When Peter was thirteen years old, his father committed suicide. Later in life, he comes across some letters his father had sent from the trenches of World War One. Certain words and phrases in these letters reveal a side of his father the man had never suspected when he was growing up. As he digs deeper and deeper into his family's past, he uncovers a world he realizes he had never understood, could never even have imagined. Just beneath the surface of the apparently quiet, civilized, well-bred world of his family he had known as a child, there was a completely different reality, a parallel universe of suppressed loves and hates, sexual deviations and appallingly violent actions, involving not only his parents and grandparents and the rest of his family, but also finally - and most devastatingly of all - himself.