The main character of the novel is simply called a fugitive, and he has run away from civilization to an uninhabited Polynesian island. He starts to write in a diary after tourists unexpectedly come, and it is about what is written in this diary that we read.
The fugitive thinks that people on the island is sort of a miracle since it seemed so unlikely, but the fear hidden inside of him arises with the thought that they could turn him over to the authorities. The fugitive is a Venezuelan writer who was sentenced to prison, believing that he is on the island of Villings. However, this island is thought to have a strange and unidentifiable disease that seems almost like radiation poisoning.
While watching one of the tourists that watches the sun set everyday from a hill on the island, the fugitive falls in love with her. A man named Morel often talks to her though. He finally decides to approach the woman while she is alone, but she ignores her. The result is found ot be the same with all of the others on the island, and he believes that the conversations between the man and woman (that are in another language) are repeated every day. It is at this point that the fugitive starts to doubt his mental state.
The tourists suddenly all vanish. The fugitive is unsuccessful in finding any evidence that they were ever there to begin with. Thinking that there was some kind of food poisoning involved, he dismisses everything until they reappear that night. He starts seeing other things that are strange, including two suns and two moons.
The next day, he hears Morel telling the tourists that he has created a machine that is capable of recreating reality, capturing everyone's souls to replay the same week over and over again (so that he can spend time with the woman he loves, who is the same that the fugitive loves).
One of the tourists figures out that experiments with the same machine on other people, there were deaths, and finds out that the tourists will die too. The strange things that the fugitive saw, like the two suns and moons, are explained by the machine's operation.
During the last parts of the book, things get a little more confusing, the fugitive thinking of all of the other uses of the invention and inserting himself into the "recording". He starts to wait to die so that his soul can be kept on the recording, and asks a man who is going to create a machine to merge souls to merge his with the woman tourist.
