Laura Gethryn spends the first 7 years of her life in the shadow of the Black Mountains. Her horsey mother idolizes the absent soldier and his return a broken man, emasculated by the Great War, leaves them destined to remain the disappointed parents of a single girl child. Caught up in the dance of dysfunction that is their marriage, they hand over Laura's education to Mr Howells, a very different man to Gethryn. Welsh speaking, working-class and intellectual, he, his talented daughter, Mair, and disaffected son, Idris, open Laura's eyes to a surprising new world. Years later, Laura receives in the mail a package: Mr Howell's Parisian notebooks detailing his failure to escape the chains of his upbringing. Reading them, destroying them, may be the biggest service she does both her mentor and her future self.