One evening, Toño Azpilcueta, a Peruvian folk music journalist, witnesses a performance that changes his life. Toño becomes obsessed with hearing the virtuoso guitarist Lalo Molfino play again, but the next he hears, Molfino is dead.

So begins a quest to uncover the story of this unforgettable musician. Toño tracks down the priest who rescued Molfino from a rubbish heap and raised him, the musicians who played with him and the girl who claimed to love him. Toño decides that he will write a book that will not only immortalize the hero of the Creole vals but will establish the music he loved as a unifying symbol for his fractured country.

But the more Toño writes, the more he struggles to keep control of his story. As his savings dwindle and his paranoia rises, it becomes clear that writing a masterpiece is more complicated and consuming than he had realised.