It explores themes of hypocrisy, privilege, drugs, and homosexuality, with the emerging AIDS crisis forming a backdrop to the book's conclusion.

Nick's stay is meant to last for a short time while Toby and his parents—Rachel, the daughter of an extremely wealthy Rothschild-like Jewish family, and Gerald, a successful businessman and just-elected Conservative MP for Barwick—are at their holiday home in France.

Nick dates Leo Charles, a black man from Willesden in his late 20s, whom he meets through a lonely hearts column.

As Leo lives with his religious mother and Nick feels restricted in the Fedden household, the two conduct their sexual affair almost entirely outside in public parks and side streets.

Despite the fact that Nick is openly gay, Wani appears to have a female fiancée and remains closeted, so their relationship is kept secret.

Though Nick is finishing his doctorate on Henry James, he spends most of his time living a decadent lifestyle of drugs and sex with Wani who lavishes him with money and expensive gifts.

Nick watches as his former gay university friend Polly is elected an MP at 28 and Gerald barely scrapes back in his seat.

Shortly after, the press (who have been camped outside the Feddens' home), publish a story on Wani and Nick, causing greater scandal.

He goes back to the Feddens' house to collect his things, knowing they are absent for a wedding, and runs into Penny, who reveals that she is going to continue her affair with Gerald.

Nick leaves the Feddens' house for the final time, and muses on the HIV test he is having done the next day, which he imagines will be positive.

The book touches upon the emergence of HIV/AIDS, as well as the relationship between politics and homosexuality, and its ambivalent acceptance within the 1980s Conservative Party and mainstream society.

Social and economic classes are also a major theme: Nick envies the house, connections and mannerism of the Fedden family.

It is made particularly apparent when the Fedden and Nick visit Toby's aristocratic uncle, who owns several rare pieces of furniture and books.

[10] James Wood, writing for The New Republic, praised the novel, calling it "an ample and sophisticated delight, charged with hundreds of delicate impressions and insights, and scores of vital and lovely sentences", although he criticized the ending as a "somewhat trite and anachronistic vision of the homosexual as a figure always doomed to be unhoused and exiled from happiness, solitary and lonely, without family or friends, always nostalgic for a bosom that has always, if only secretly, rejected him.

Dan Stevens plays Nick Guest, with Oliver Coleman as Toby, Alice Krige as Rachel, and Tim McInnerny as Gerald.