Adam Weller is a moderately successful novelist, past his prime, but squiring around a much younger woman and still longing for greater fame and glory. His former wife, Eleanor, is unhappily playing the role of the overweight, discarded woman. Their daughter Maud has just begun a frankly sexual affair that unexpectedly becomes life-changing. Into each of these lives the past intrudes in a way that will test them to their core. With perfect pitch and a rare empathy, Brian Morton is equally adept at portraying the life of the mind and how it plays out in the world, brilliantly tracing the...

Leonard Schiller is a novelist in his seventies, a second-string but respectable talent who produced only a small handful of books. Heather Wolfe is an attractive graduate student in her twenties. She read Schiller s novels when she was growing up and they changed her life. When the ambitious Heather decides to write her master s thesis about Schiller s work and sets out to meet him convinced she can bring Schiller back into the literary world s spotlight the unexpected consequences of their meeting alter everything in Schiller s ordered life. What follows is a quasi-romantic friendship and...