A potent, startlingly original novel, Moths tells the parallel stories of a father and son, separated by war. Cornelius, a self-indulgent Dutch businessman, embarks on a dangerous mission to observe the Nazi death camps only to be captured by the liberating Red Army and eventually incarcerated in a penal colony in Stalin's Gulag. Meanwhile his young son, Dolboy, a prodigious runner,spends his days with the daughter of an aristocratic family, in the woodland summer house where she breeds exotic moths.

As the fifties come to an end, their paths finally converge as Dolboy - at the height of his athletic powers - meets the father he thought dead and, in a gripping and emotional denouement,finds himself running for life.