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On Armistice Day, the streets are loud with celebrating crowds and fireworks, yet Valentine Wannop is pulled into a far darker mood by a phone call. Her close friend Christopher Tietjens, still haunted by the shelling and brutality he survived at the front, may be slipping mentally, and Valentine, a committed pacifist, feels compelled to find him again. The question is what their meeting will bring.

This is the fourth and final novel in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End sequence, a modernist work about the First World War and its aftermath. The story follows Christopher, an English gentleman whose wartime experiences have left deep scars, and Valentine, whose loyalty to him and whose opposition to the war shape her actions.

Ford, an English novelist and critic, built the series around fractured memory and shifting viewpoints, so the reader experiences the emotional weight of the postwar years as the characters do.