Three stories, three secrets, three marriages. In a coastal village in Cork in 1969, a Russian painter and his Irish novelist wife write letters to one another as they try to come to terms with a fatal illness. On Australia's west coast in 2011, a bookseller writes to her estranged partner in an attempt to understand what has happened to their relationship. In Bournemouth in 1948, a retired English doctor writes letters to the love of his life, a German artist he lived with in Vienna during the 1930s. The simple domestic lives of these three couples are set against conversations about intimacy, art, war and loss. Told in a series of unforgettable letters, this is a novel about love and what it means when it might be coming to an end.