Moira Grayson is a heroin addict, living in a sordid London squat in the hippie 1970s, unfit to look after her baby. She was close to death when her American lover carried off the baby Alexander to give him a loving home in the Mid-West and an affluent future. But now Alex is twenty-seven, orphaned and afflicted by a sense of lost roots and a romantic vision of what he sees as the magical and sacred, heroic and democratic, happy and glorious realms of England. A business trip provides the chance to go and trace his unknown relatives. He finds friendship, mystery and comfort from a quite unexpected direction. He discovers that while some British people are seriously hard to get along with, some turn out to be, after all, more closely akin to him than he could ever have imagined.