"... there's no war here. All we have is people throwing their weight around. You surely didn't think country villages were full of nice kindly people helping each other? Our war is village toughs settling scores, eyeing you up, leering at you, pawing you if they get the chance. People you wouldn't have trusted with sixpence a while ago, standing outside the grocers with pistols in their belts, pushing you in the back. Everybody spying on everybody else." Lucy is a painter. She has everything: fame, money and reputation. She also has Oscar. At least, he has always been there. One fine day, she will do something about that. It was, as she says, hardly a love affair, more a kind of marriage. Perhaps, even war-torn France is safe enough on the Oscar front. But Lucy is deceiving herself. Set before and after the second world war in London, Edinburgh, Saint-Valery-sur-Somme, Dundee and a remote village in war-time France, two painters struggle to come to terms with the casual brutality of war. A love story. Alan Kennedy's fourth novel - a masterly account of love, loss and reconciliation.