Before dawn one day in midwinter, a man in crisis returns to a city he left behind long ago. Feeling his sense of self falling apart, he sets off on foot through familiar streets to seek the support of old acquaintances. But then, instead of reuniting with others, he takes a turn around a corner, wandering off on tangents and moving in ever-expanding circles. Too ashamed to do what he must, he slows down and reminisces on his past in this place. He recalls years of precarity and indignities, of kinship with the downtrodden and sympathy for the dispossessed.

Part prose poem, part autofiction, In Ruins embarks on a psychogeography of Edinburgh and its wearier hideaways. Stringing a series of narratives along restless, recursive lines of thought, this elegiac novel drifts through the city like a lost soul in limbo. As it swerves back and forth between momentum and inertia, it gives voice to an itinerant mind whose words may be just another delay in a confrontation with the inevitable.