In a scruffy park of a West European metropolis, a man in an ill-fitting trench coat is found hanging by the feet, half-dead. This is Abel Nema, the protagonist of Terézia Mora's internationally acclaimed novel, a linguistic phenomenon who can speak ten languages flawlessly but whose grip on reality is slowly slipping away.

Since his self-imposed exile from his Balkan homeland, Abel has been making a life among fellow refugees. His acquaintances include a neighbor who claims to have visited heaven, the sordid characters who frequents the neighbourhood sex bar, and a wonderful family he joins when, desperate to extend his residency permit, he enters into a fictive marriage. Yet through it all he remains strangely hollow: for all his languages he has little humanity to put into words.

Day In, Day Out is at once an evocation of the newly multicultural Europe and an exploration of a deeply disturbed individual.