A beautiful literary novel about the grace that friendship can bestow on us. It tells the story of a young university lecturer in England whose life is touched by three disparate characters: a young writer originally from a poor community in South Africa's Karoo with whom he falls in love and who is subsequently murdered by her boyfriend; a homeless man and his dog outside the Oxford Circus Tube station, and a troubled American student who needed, but didn’t receive, his kindness when they were students at Cambridge.