Lucas, Danny, Michael, Rachel, Martha and Jo met as undergraduates at Oxford University and have been a tight-knit group of friends ever since. The novel opens on New Year's Eve as, now in their late-twenties, they arrive at Stoneborough Manor, a stately pile that Lucas has inherited after the suicide of his art-dealer uncle. Best friends since university, Lucas and Jo have lusted after each other for years and finally risk their friendship to begin a relationship but Lucas is haunted by the deaths of his parents and uncle and becomes obsessed by cinefilms of them at Stoneborough twenty years earlier. Within the claustrophobic confines of the house over a hot, decadent summer, sexual tensions escalate, shattering the group's friendship and changing all their lives irrevocably.