Isham Cook, an English teacher in China, has it all worked out. He lives a highly ordered life of the mind and is not one to be swayed by circumstance, until his dispassionate existence is tripped up by Cookie, an elusive woman fleetingly glimpsed around his gritty Beijing neighborhood. He then becomes captivated by the flamboyant eroticism of a woman he meets on the subway, Luna, who radically overhauls his most basic preconceptions. A third woman of ambiguous Asiatic ethnicity, the beautiful Adalat, is as unknowable as the others and he becomes obsessed with her as well. Finally, a fourth character appears with the ultimate trump card, one capable of pulling apart the very coordinates of Isham's reality, including the narrative itself.

A hypnotic journey of a novel, with idea bombs going off along the way, Lust & Philosophy is mind-rape as literature, a fairytale on acid, and a holographic Rorschach test all in one, and will appeal to fans of Hermann Hesse, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard and other novelists of the uncanny.