Dexter Bucknell, sometime hotshot metropolitan publisher turned freelance copy editor, was born a somehow less preposessing 'Desmond'. A farmer's son with a heavy chip on his shoulder - about the size of a herd of cattle - he's kicked over the traces and exchanged struggling acres for a small triangle of city greensward, by way of a short swim at the shark-infested end of the publishing pond. And now it's August, and Fun Week for the kids in Bethnal Green, where forty-year-old single parent Dexter is hoping to inveigle his live-in girlfriend, Moy, into marrying him and - even less likely - being a mother to his two young sons. While Moy escapes daily to her Mile End studio to work on her stained glass, Dexter is left at home to juggle work and debts and domestic chores. Further complicating their lives are Dexter's furiously letter-writing ex-wife, his mother, Moy's schizophrenic brother, and the unavoidable decision Dexter has to confront about his future. Love and loyalty, and how to keep them; money, and how to get it; the stranglehold hold of memory and roots; the importance of the work we do (and how it defines us); the gap between what we think and what we say; the fine line