This novel is short, just 90,000 words. However, the story spans thirty-five years, and it is played out on three continents and in seven cities. One of the locales is Menorca, Spain.
The plot can be best summed up by this quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes:
The life of an individual is in many respects like a child’s dissected map. If I could look back on the whole, as we look at the child’s map when it is put together, I feel that I should have my whole life intelligently laid out before me.
What happens when a young couple meet when they are just starting out in life, launching their careers, and then tragedy strikes, not to them, but nevertheless this tragedy changes the course of their lives. It is not a case of a Robert Frost’s ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood’ but rather of one single event that shifts the course of two lives. But then, by circumstances and coincidences, their paths cross when they are in mid-life, and they reevaluate and re-encounter what kept them apart for all of their lives.