First there was The White Room. Now, four years later, the tables are turned, as Ivana, once the object of Zoran's desperate search, searches in her turn for the missing Zoran. For why, after delivering his usual online creative writing class, should Professor Zivkovic suddenly get up, leave the apartment unlocked and venture out into the Belgrade winter night without hat, coat, gloves and scarf? Why should he reappear mysteriously on a park bench, two and a half hours later, with no memory of where he has been, and apparently suffering no ill-effects from his exposure to the cold? Once again, police and Agency forces are drawn into an ever more perplexing mystery, one in which truly impossible things begin to happen - even putting Zoran's life at risk. Surely it has something to do with the unopenable document on Professor Zivkovic's desktop titled 'New Novel'? But he had sworn he would never write another novel... Narrated in the warm, truculent voice of Ivana, The Black Room exemplifies not only the irresistible force of the creative urge, but that of love and death.