Tom Bedford has put his past behind him--until his son Danny is charged with murder. In the chaos of war, Danny has been caught in a violent skirmish gone bloodily awry, and the Army needs someone to pay for the mistake. Shocked into action, Tom confronts the violence in his past and fights to save the son he'd let slip away.

"In a working-class town in a county west of London, a schoolgirl scribbles in the back pages of her exercise book, thrilling to the first sparks of her own inventiveness. As she grows, she becomes one on whom nothing is lost. Not the novels an eccentric customer slips her at the grocery store where she works as a checkout clerk, or the indelible outline of the careening creature himself. Not the growing heaps of books in which she loses-and finds-herself....