Cast out from her West Cork village, sixteen years old and pregnant, Catherine Goggin makes her way to Dublin to start afresh. She has no choice but to believe that the nun to whom she entrusts her child will find him a better life.The baby is named Cyril by his adoptive parents, Charles and Maude Avery, a well-to-do but deeply eccentric couple who treat him more like a curiosity than a son. You're not a real Avery, they tell him.
And perhaps he isn't. But through them he meets Julian Woodbead who, even from childhood, seems destined for an infinitely more glamorous and dangerous life. And so begins one man's funny and moving search to find his place in a world that seems to delight in gently tormenting him at every turn. Buffeted by circumstance and, at times, the consequences of his own questionable judgement, Cyril must navigate his emotions and desires in a search for that most elemental human need, happiness.