On the cusp of his thirtieth birthday, gay teacher Justin lives in Paris and struggles with Post Traumatic Stress. Although he navigates his life with wit and style, he is a broken young man, shattered by the death of two friends in the Bataclan massacre and the accidental (and gruesome) death of his mother at Justin and his husband Théophile's country house. Much of the novel centers around the arrival in Paris of the family of Justin's best friend Hamish. However, here too everything seems to be unraveling. Hamish's mother, the famed English sculptor India Chatterton, married to the equally famed American horror writer Balfour Bedminister, is dying of a brain tumour.