An honest ghost

Prompted by the chore of packing up his books, the narrator goes back to an autobiographical novel about the day his son, Joe, first appears on his doorstep at nine years old. The narrator is uneasy about sharing his days with such an exceptionally advanced child, yet Joe's arrival stirs him deeply. Gradually he must reshape his own life to take on fatherhood, a duty he partly shares with his younger English partner, David. Joe's mother, Eleanor Sullivan, is an unpredictable presence who pursues her own fulfillment.

The household is disrupted when David brings a new acquaintance into it, Roy Hardeman, a peculiar gay police officer whose arrival and departure are equally puzzling. The novel's central concern is memory, both literary and personal: how elusive and insistent it can be, how little it can be trusted, and how a narrative might grasp, revisit and reshape what has been remembered.