Novelist Graham Broadbent coasts through life like many of the characters in his books, low-key and unassertive quietly accepting the easy pace his success has allowed him. But one evening, minutes before leaving to speak at his school reunion, attractive twenty-year-old Christa appears at his hotel door and tells Graham he is her father, although Graham hasn’t seen the girl’s mother in twenty-five years. Curiosity and perhaps an unrealised desire to remedy the doldrums of middle age lead Graham to investigate who this girl really is, and why she came to him with such an obvious lie. As he digs deeper into his past, Graham finds himself in a confusion of deception and lies far beyond his mastery of plot and character.