Whilst attempting to leave his hometown to meet an old friend for a fishing trip Brad Carter encounters an invisible barrier preventing his leaving the town. No one can leave Millville, no one can enter. Inanimate objects can be transferred through, just as non-sentient life does not seem to suffer the same restriction on their movement.

But no one knows where this comes from or why it has encircled this small American community. Soon after Brad Carter encounters the naked form of Tupper Tyler (an retarded man missing for the previous decade) in his garden, amongst a patch of purple flowers that had been cultivated by Brad father. When Tupper disappears, Brad follows him and is transported into another world.

In this world he discovers that these flowers are part of a intelligent plant life-form that were genetically advanced by a highly developed race centuries earlier and now are moving between alternate world searching for a species that will help them make use of their knowledge, and they want to use him as there liaison to the people of Earth.

This last is a major problem with this book. Essentially humanity's first contact with another intelligence is with flowers. I almost put the book down when I got to that part, after all it seemed a little silly.

I am glad I didn't, though, as this is a well-written book. If you can let the strangeness of this section of the plot you'll read a very enjoyable story. It's just a shame that this is in the story as I didn't find that this was a necessary part of the story – plant based intelligence, no problem, but why little purple flowers?