Luke Banas is a young video artist who lives illegally in the disused Domino sugar refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. While his art is an attempt to fully record and share his own life story, developers want to tear down the building where he works; a building that’s a monument to his hip neighborhood’s industrial past.

The novel’s narrator, Lila Fairfax, is a journalist writing her first feature article about Luke and the fate of the factory. Observant and astute, she soon realizes that, despite his obsessive self-revelation, Luke is hiding a secret. Lila’s rational, detached approach to life is disrupted as, in the course of her reporting, she falls in love with Luke and as a result, learns far more than she anticipated.

Though primarily a love story, The Sugar Factory is also an investigation of art, and art’s interaction with commerce, history, and new technology.