In the late summer of 1913 the young poet Cecil Valance comes to stay at 'Two Acres', the home of his close Cambridge friend George Sawle, and of his sister, Daphne. The weekend will be one of excitements and confusions for all the Sawles, a weekend in which a poem is written which will become a touchstone for a generation, an evocation of an England about to change for ever. Linking the Sawle and Valance families irrevocably, the shared intimacies of this weekend become legendary events in a larger story, told and interpreted in different ways over the ensuing century, and subjected to the scrutiny of critics and biographers with their own agendas and anxieties. In a sequence of widely separated episodes we follow the two families through startling changes in fortune and circumstance. Throughout this often richly comic history of sexual mores and literary reputation runs the story of Daphne, from innocent girlhood to wary old age. Around her, Hollinghurst draws an absorbing picture of an England constantly in flux. Spanning almost the whole of the twentieth century and written in five sections of gloriously contrasting mood, setting and texture, the whole is a symphonic novel of incredible power, thrilling and profoundly moving.