Billy Palmer is nineteen and wants everything to be new. So he ditches the West Country and his university studies - to his parents' dismay - and sets a course for Marrakesh and its snake charmers and storytellers. First stop en route? London, of course.

London has its boarding houses, bars and bookshops to detain him. It's 1968 and Soho is swinging. He meets an albino Marxist, Peter, who tries to enlist him in the cause and drag him to Grosvenor Square for the Vietnam War demonstration. But Billy has other things on his mind. He is diverted westward, up a Cornish creek to a recording studio in the back of beyond where his sister's boyfriend is trying to be another Eric Clapton. The lead singer's ex-girlfriend gives the detour a new dimension. While he is making other plans, life happens to Billy, and then it doesn't. Just how far is he prepared to go to test what he wants, and who he is?

The boy whose childhood moved so many in WINTERING here learns what being a man might be in a world that is itself changing fast, changing radically on the surface of things, where the underlying realities shift and swirl like sand under Billy's feet. Where will Billy Palmer stand as a young man?