In a city far in the future, in a society that has come through a great upheaval, retired scholar Wiggins moves from window to window in a museum. Among scenes of animals and birds rendered in baroque detail, Wiggins unspools the secrets of his world--the war that brought it to the brink, and the great thinker, Michaux, who led the movement of recording and preserving its history in dioramas.

After a phone call in the middle of the night, Wiggins sets out to visit the Diorama of the Town: an entire, dioramic world, hundreds of miles across, dedicated to the display of people, mostly against their will. All this life, Wiggins has longed to see it. But in the Town, where the treatment of people mirrors the treatment of animals, he comes face to face with the diorama's contradictions. Its legacy of political violence. Its manipulation by those with power and money. And its paper-thin promise of immortality.

In this hybrid novel--part essay, part prose poem, part travel narrative--Blair Austin brings us nose to the glass with our own vanishing world, what we preserve and at what cost.