"With forty pounds he went back to England.

Curlews cried in the bog next to Ballinasloe station. A taxi-man looked harassed - no work maybe. They kissed - slenderly.

The train left. She walked away." And so Susan O'Hallrahan feels Diarmaid retreat from her once more, just before his eighteenth birthday. In the quiet of her Galway home, she is forced to confront a ruptured relationship with her only son, and the significance of the ikons that mark the progress of his troubled childhood. A reclusive boy, haunted by a trauma from his schooldays, Diarmaid is an enigma Susan determines to decode.

As she pursues him across England, meeting friends and lovers left in his wake, she resigns herself to the man her son has become, and faces a new identity of her own. In this story about the dark complexities of love, the mysteries of sexuality, the anguishes of motherhood.