"From the Booker Award winner: a luminous, profoundly moving work of fiction that begins with an afternoon tryst in 1924 between a servant girl and the young man of the neighboring house, but then opens to reveal the whole life of a remarkable woman. Twenty-two-year-old Jane Fairchild, orphaned at birth, has worked as a maid at one English country estate since she was sixteen. And for almost all of those years she has been the secret lover to Paul...

Follows the lives of four men, covering nearly a half-century of these South London buddies lives, from thier adopted pub to Margate Pier. Through a series of flashbacks, they take you on a journey of a lifetime. Along with them are the ashes of Jack, their larger-than-life friend, whose deathbed request sends them on their way.