How do you know right from wrong when your certainties about life are slipping through your fingers?

Phillip Snowe is a genius of the advertising world but what he can no longer do is sell himself to himself. Struggling to find meaning, he quits his career to give something back.

Julia, his wife, a brilliant and beautiful lawyer, fights her own demons, but with her intelligence and hard work, she believes she can keep them at bay. And so far she has.

Into their lives comes Laura Cusack, a single mother torn between the demands of her young daughters and her own unfulfilled passions.

Whose needs should you put first? Your family's? Your neighbour's? A complete stranger's? Or your own? And once you have made that choice, how do you live with yourself?

Spanning three generations, this compassionate and surprising story, touching profoundly upon love, art, religion and the search for fulfilment, grips from first to last as it explores the moral and emotional complexities of modern life.