Ezra and Sheena Pepin live in Blenheim Orchard in North Oxford with their three children: fourteen-year-old Blaise, entering the storm-world of adolescence. Hector, eleven and precociously clever, and sweet Louie, three years old and the family tyrant. Ezra, a disaffected employee at Isis Water, has abandoned his calling as an anthropologist; Sheena has inadvertently found hers running a travel company. They are like everyone else: over-worked, worried about the children, trying to steer their marriage on an even keel. But change comes knocking at the Pepins' door - and the family will never be quite the same again.