Harry Caldecote, former librarian, finds retirement anything but restful.

He expected the freedoms of age and of the 1980s. Instead, he gets something like bondage: responsibility for everyone he knows -- his grown children, his brother, even worse his sister, who arrives to keep house. How can Harry mount his amorous adventures with time and privacy shorn away?

Yet desire and duty, love and loyalty, are opposite sides of the same coin and in THE FOLKS THAT LIVE ON THE HILL Amis once again illuminates that irritating contradiction with characteristic wit and insight.