Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio
producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and
television personality, are old school friends. Despite very different
lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their
former teacher, Libor Sevcik. Both Libor and Finkler are recently
widowed, and together with Treslove they share a sweetly painful evening
revisiting a time before they had loved and lost. It is that very
evening, when Treslove hesitates a moment as he walks home, that he is
attacked - and his whole sense of who and what he is slowly and
ineluctably changes.