When Tim Hughes joins his precocious schoolfriend Julian in a holiday job sorting out the library of an elderly neighbour, Harald Meades, he doesn't comprehend the emotions, both adult and adolescent, with which he is about to tangle. Harald's mathematician son and his wife are planning to part, and the arrival of their daughter Harriet soon transforms the thoughts and feelings of both boys and puts each to a different test - while the life of their parents and of Meades himself are also changed radically. In his fortieth book, a tragi-comedy of three generations, Stanley Middleton triumphantly proves that he has lost none of the sureness of feeling for his characters, the sense of place or the psychological insights which are so much a part of his earlier novels.