A late spring christening brings back together four old friends who have not seen each other since their graduation day, twenty years before. They enjoy the hot summer bank holiday catching up with each other and then return to their own, established routines. But the christening has acted as a catalyst and no one's life is the same again. The novel is based in Ireland and in Kent, over a heat wave summer, when new relationships spring from nowhere, redundancies happen, a new business starts, an old lover is lost, a marriage unravels, a young horse is trained for a competition and a difficult teenager finds a talent she didn't know she had. All four women, having seen little of each other for so many years, suddenly find their lives are intertwined. They each struggle to keep up with the upheaval until the heat wave breaks and tragedy strikes.