Robert Exley works for the Faculty: he spends his life making sure that nothing ever happens. In counter-terrorism, that's your job. But something's going on.

His wife, Mary, also worked at the Faculty. She's been dead for years, but somehow she's never far away.

His father worked there, too, and spent a lifetime on a mountaintop watching out for signals, hoping not to see them. His bookish teenage son, Stephen, writes an encrypted journal Exley feels obliged to decode, to read the things they cannot talk about. Lately it's all about the boy's grandfather. And even if it's mostly fiction, Exley knows there's only one end to that story.

The Faculty of Indifference is a comedy about counter-terrorism, torture, boredom, suicide and death by natural causes. Trapped between the memory of an intolerable past and the anticipation of so much worse to come, Exley finds there's nothing he can do but live.