'What I want you to have, Imogen, above all, is a sense of your own
history; a sense of where you come from, and of the forces that made you.'
Rosamund lies dying in her remote Shropshire home. But before she does so,
she has one last task: to put on tape not just her own story but the story
of the young blind girl, her cousin's granddaughter, who turned up
mysteriously at her party all those years ago. This is a story of
generations, of the relationships within a family - and of what goes to
make a child. Called the best English novelist of his generation by Nick
Hornby, Jonathan Coe extends his range in this magnificent account of a
Shropshire family in the last half of the twentieth century.