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In 1962, fourteen-year-old Neil Pritchard is sent away to spend the summer with his aunt while his parents try to resurrect their faltering marriage. There, Neil is enlisted by the famous composer Euan Bone to act as musical muse for Bone's new work, which is to be based on an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson. Naive and inexperienced, Neil is dazzled by Bone's attention, and he becomes desperate to keep it. Day after day, he returns to Slezer's Wark, the strange and beautiful house that Bone shares with the cellist Douglas Maitland. The blissful summer turns tragic, however, when Neil is expelled from his Eden, with devastating consequences for all involved.
Thirty-five years later, Neil is asked to write the biography of Euan Bone. Doing so, he knows, means resurrecting the events of that summer and facing the secrets he has hidden, even from himself, for all those years.
