A modern opera called The Giant divides its audience at the opening of a new London opera house, and the question of who wrote it reaches back across a lifetime. The composer is Vernon Deyre, an Englishman raised in lonely privilege at a crumbling country estate, where music takes hold of him before he can name what it is. The story follows him from a sheltered, imaginative childhood through the friendships and loves that shape him: his fierce cousin Joe, who longs to sculpt; the devoted Sebastian Levinne, whose family settle near the Deyres; the beautiful, timid Nell Vereker, who draws Vernon toward an ordinary life; and the older singer Jane Harding, who understands the music in him as no one else does. War interrupts everything, and a wounded, displaced Vernon must rebuild a sense of self from fragments. At the center is a steady tension between the people who love him and the work that demands all of him, and the question of what a gifted life costs those near it. Tracing one man across decades of England before and after the First World War, the narrative weighs love against vocation, family expectation against private compulsion, and asks whether genius can be served without sacrificing the ordinary happiness of others.