At Cambridge in the mid-1970s, Steve Percival drifts through his final year as an undergraduate, drawn as much to poetry and philosophy as he is to the friends who anchor him. Restless, observant, and unsure of the shape his life should take, he moves through a shifting landscape of libraries, lanes, and late-night conversations where the boundaries between thought and experience begin to blur.
His creative project - a long poem he calls
Event/Horizon
- becomes a lens through which he tries to understand desire, identity, and the fault-lines of the self. But Steve is also pulled by the competing tidal forces of the women around him: Angie with her sharp moral clarity, Ginny with her mercurial intelligence, and Grace with her unsettling mixture of insight and reserve. Each exerts her own gravity, drawing him toward different versions of who he might become.
Set against the texture of university life,
is a psychological portrait of a formative year and a meditation on the ways language, memory, and imagination refract one another. It traces the quiet turning-points - intellectual, emotional, and otherwise - that alter a young man's trajectory even before he realises it.
The first novel in The Thieves of Time, a sequence exploring art, identity, and the shifting horizons of selfhood.