The novel is set in 2010. Stephen Sawbridge is a housemaster at a small boarding school. He was at university in Cambridge during the student protests of the late sixties. On the occasion of a reunion at his old college he receives an email from another student in his group of friends which revives memories of that time, and of a tragedy that affected all of them. At the reunion, tensions that had been buried for years resurface, and Stephen has to face up to a dark secret he has suppressed for forty years.