What happens when you fall in love with the one person you shouldn't?
Jess Arrowsmith, forty-something and recently divorced, begins a passionate love affair with her son's best friend, twenty-two-year-old Rob. As their feelings for each other begin to take over their lives, Jess has to face the antagonism of her family: her daughter Beth, who is herself embroiled in a hopeless affair with the married Sam; her sister Lizzie, trying to rekindle her career as an actress; and her ex-husband Ian, who left her three years previously and is now married to a much younger woman.
But the Arrowsmiths have much more to blame Rob for than just his affair with Jess, for he has been accused of another, much greater crime, one that has affected them as a family deeply and irrevocably. And as the trial date approaches, faced with the fact that none of their lives will ever be the same again, they are overtaken by events that none of them can control.
A complex, moving and absorbing novel about the lives of a family shattered by tragedy, and a love affair kindled against all the odds.
