1:00 A.M.

Paula Hook lies awake next to her husband, Mike; her sixteen-year-old twins, Kate and Nick, are asleep down the hall. When the day begins, she and Mike will share a secret with their children that may change all their lives forever. Paula wants Kate and Nick to know a long hidden truth, a "bed-time story" that will reveal not just the secret but the often unexpected course of the lives—hers and Mike's, their families', the twins'—that have been profoundly, if not always knowingly, shaped by it.

In an eloquent, emotion-filled narrative of Paula's life with Mike, she describes both the certain and the surprising ways that having children can mean "reconstructing the world." And Graham Swift gives us not only a quietly searing novel about the nature of family but also a dazzling meditation on how little it takes to transform the world.