Fighting off the boredom of lockdown, acclaimed author Jim Winter decides to share his skills by setting up an anonymous online writing workshop – but his generosity will cost him more than he knows. Right away, the work of a talented student known only as Deirdre stands out. Her novel concerns the death of Mattie Lantry, a lonely seventeen-year-old found murdered in the now-distant summer of 1980, in the local cemetery of his quiet fishing town.

The writing is brilliant, but there’s one problem: Jim grew up with Mattie, and Deirdre knows things that only he and his schoolfriends should know. Chapter by chapter, she’s revealing a story that he’s worked all his life to repress. Who is Deirdre, and what will her novel uncover? To find out, Jim must return to the town he fled all those years ago.

As his buried past and perfect present collide, the stories he’s told about his own nature – to his reading public, to his loved ones and to himself – begin to fall apart.