From the award-winning author of The Untouchable ("Contemporary fiction gets no better than this."--Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review), an elegiac, deeply moving, and eminently accessible novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory. The voice we hear is that of Max, a middle-aged Englishman, a writer and self-described dilettante who has been supported by his wife's money. Now, after his wife's recent death, Max has gone back to the seaside town where he lived as a child--a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his new life without her, and a return to the place where he encountered the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time.