[1] The plot centres on Polly Slade, an ordinary woman with a highly unusual past, whose world is thrown into turmoil when the two men in her life show up at her front door in the middle of the night: Jack, a general in the United States Army with whom she had a short-lived affair as a teenager and Peter, an obsessive stalker who has been terrifying her for the past two years.

Themes of the novel include obsession, rape, the morality of war, gender politics, and whether one can ever hope to return to the past and find that everything is just as one remembers it.

Polly Slade is a 34-year-old woman with no money, no love life and a boring, run of the mill job at the local town council.

She was at that time an activist and saboteur living in a "peace camp" in the countryside, whom Jack met at a motorway service station while he was positioned in England with his work.

When she complains that he cannot just reappear in her life after such a long absence, he comes to the point of his visit: he intends to kill her to prevent the details of his relationship with her becoming public.