When Olivia meets Francis—a naturalist living off the grid—their connection is immediate and startling. Eager to involve her best friend Lucy in her joy, Olivia introduces the two but Lucy has received shocking news of her own that binds the trio unusually close. Over the months that follow, Lucy's boss, Olivia's psychoanalyst parents, and a young man named Sebastian are pulled into the friends' orbit, and in this characteristically witty and perceptive novel by the author of the Patrick Melrose series, not one of them will emerge unchanged.