Follows a seventy-year-long wartime marriage between two seemingly incompatible partners in sometimes tender, sometimes excruciating detail. Studded with allusions to poems and novels, it is set in locations that include London during the 1920s and 1940s, Tunisia during World War Two, the Cotswolds, a new post-war suburb, and a Mediterranean cruise ship. The protagonist, Harry Miles, is born on a working-class London street, wins a scholarship, and grows into a sensitive man torn between a love of poetry and a more prosaic ability to understand what is required of him and to do it. Evelyn, the magnetic and demanding woman whom he marries as WW2 breaks out, increasingly tests Harry's capacity to love, and, on the cusp of death, abandons him. This is a love story, albeit an unconventional one. Winner of the 2018 Roger's Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Bestseller. 2018.