This is the story of a man who believes in all the British values of a stiff upper lip and keeping emotion in check. He also believes you can only truly love one person in your life, and he loses that love when his wife dies. Taking work as a teacher of English as a foreign language, he begins a series of affairs with his students, knowing that because each of them has to go home after a few months there will be no commitments and no future in any of the relationships. Until he meets a woman who turns all his ideas - about being English, about being foreign, about being able to love - upside down. This novel has all the emotional power and humour of Tony Parson's 1999 hit novel, Man and Boy.