They married at St Mary Abbots, Kensington, in September 1948, the groom, the ambitious son of the editor of the Express; the bride, the beautiful, somewhat rebellious daughter of blamelessly upstanding family of the provincial middle-middle class. A young man who was pushed forward by family expectation, a young woman pulled back...In this poignant and perceptive portrait of his parents' catastrophically acrimonious divorce, Rupert Christiansen tells the story of a generation. With the narrative power of the likes of The Ice Storm and Revolutionary Road, he chronicles the experience not just of one particular class, but of an era, when the loosening of the stays on middle-class marriage precipitated a rollercoaster decade of heartbreak and loss.