A beautiful, very moving, melancholic and elegiac novel set in the late 1960s in Melton, a small town in the West Country. The story revolves around a disparate group of people who come together there to establish an arts festival. There is Jack Curtis, a self-made millionaire who has bought and refurbished the local stately home; Florence Plover, a garden designer in her 60s whom he has employed and her Anglo-Greek niece, Persephone. There are the Musgrove siblings, Thomas and Mary, whose family originally owned Melton Hall, who run a failing garden nursery nearby; and there is Francis Brock, whose sister Celia, Thomas' wife, was tragically killed in a car crash some years previously. This is the story of their intertwining relationships and how they come to love, and not to love, each other in different ways and why.