Adam Morris, successful novelist and screenwriter, now in his late forties, remains the central character, but many of his contemporaries continue to feature in his life. These include the ambitious and endlessly scheming movie director Mike Clode, the Australian-born TV star Alan Parks, who now seems to front every other serious or semi-serious programme on the box, and Joyce Hadleigh, whose career on TV Alan has fostered, just as years earlier, at Cambridge, he fathered her child whom Dan Bradley, now a primary school headmaster in Wandsworth, raised as his own.