It is crunch time for the fastidious copy editor Seamus Cullen, who decades earlier had lived very differently. Failing at work and required to take leave, he finds solace in memories of his freewheeling twenties, and pursues them back to a present that's subtly altered.

His crisis has followed the death of a friend, the masterful doctor who set him up with his belated first love - and whom he had mocked for his resistance to getting loose in warm company. This sudden departure has unsettled him more than he can easily admit.

Seamus bolsters his recollections with contemporary sketches he had made of his share-household life, some of whose characters remain in his orbit. In this refreshing, often funny story about pleasure and choices, he traces the proceeds of their bargains with ambition and reconsiders his own.