A follow-up to Margaret Forster's Hidden Lives (a family memoir of three generations of women), this account takes up the story of her gritty northern father. He was not a man to answer questions - least of all about life and death - so the author attempts to answers them for herself as she looks back at her father's life and indomitable character from the perspective of his ninth decade, evoking incidents from her Cumbrian childhood, his working life and stubborn old age, trying to make sense of their largely unspoken relationship and of his tenacious hold on life and his family.