“After his mother left home, Haroun found that he couldn’t keep his mind on anything for very long, or, to be precise, for more than eleven minutes at a time. Rashid took him to a movie to cheer him up, but after exactly eleven minutes Haroun’s attention wandered, and when the film ended he had no idea how it all turned out, and had to ask Rashid if the good guys won in the end.”
The main storyline is about a boy whose older sister vanished many years ago when she wandered into the snow. She basically wandered out one night when it was snowing and never came back.