Jocelyn Pierston, a sculptor born on the rugged Isle of Slingers off the south coast of England, is haunted his whole life by a private ideal he calls the Well-Beloved: a vision of perfect womanhood that flits restlessly from one woman to the next. Over the course of decades he falls in love three times, across three generations, with women named Avice who are grandmother, mother, and daughter. Each time he believes he has at last found the embodiment of his elusive ideal, and each time the vision migrates onward, leaving him pursuing an image rather than a real person. As Pierston ages while the objects of his devotion remain perpetually young, the novel probes the gap between artistic idealism and human reality, and the way a man can love an abstraction at the cost of the women before him. Set against the stark, quarried landscape of the island, the book is one of the author's more experimental and philosophical works, more a fable about obsession, art, and the imagination than a conventional realist romance. It examines desire, aging, and the tragicomic futility of chasing an ideal that can never be possessed.