Main Characters

Clara works an entry-level job and wants to direct films. Seb has tried music, modelling and acting and settled into none of them. They meet by chance in a London square, and the pull between them is instant, obvious to everyone standing nearby.

The book follows the two of them across twenty years, but it never enters their heads. Each chapter has a different narrator from the edges of the relationship: a friend, a flatmate, a parent, a rival, even a stranger on the bus. The love story comes together piece by piece, through people who watched it from outside.

As time passes, Clara and Seb keep drifting back toward each other. Their bond grows into the kind that pulls in everyone around it, and the narrators are caught up in it as much as they observe it. Clara becomes a film director, and the plot turns when she casts Seb in the film that could make her name. That decision leads to a betrayal neither of them sees coming.

The novel is a contemporary love story told in interlinked voices, with a long time span and a London setting. The structure keeps the reader at a slight distance from the couple, so the feeling builds from what others notice, guess and misjudge about them.