Even now I can remember the first time I saw the house as clearly as if there were a video of it playing in my head. After the suicide of his uncle, a successful art dealer, Lucas Heathfield inherits Stoneborough Manor in Oxfordshire. He imagines it as a place where he and his tight-knit group of friends can spend time away from London. From the beginning, the house changes everything. Soon after their first visit on New Year's Eve, Lucas risks their close friendship to declare his love for Joanna. Everyone is delighted - they have been expecting them to get together for years. But Joanna soon senses that the house is having a strange effect on Lucas. He becomes haunted by the death of his uncle and obsessed by cine films of his uncle's friends at Stoneborough thirty years earlier.The group is disturbingly similar to their own and the films gradually reveal things about Lucas' family that he has never known before. Within the claustrophobic confines of the house over a hot, decadent summer, secrets slide out of the past and sexual tensions escalate, shattering the group's friendship and changing all their lives irrevocably.