A despot has come to power. The society is listless, submissive and scared. But beneath every violation of civil autonomy, there are humans, behind every resistance to power, there are individuals. And these people are not different to us but identical, they are not heroic or remarkable, but ordinary. Through the lives of ornithologists, bureaucrats, soldiers and tour guides, No Particular Order charts the fall, rise and continuation of a single society, asking the same repeated question “Is it empathy, or power, that endures?”