From the Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall, a breathtakingly intelligent novel that asks enormous questions. Ralph and Anna Eldred live in the big Red House in Norfolk, raising their four children and devoting thier lives to charity. The constant flood of children plucked from the squalor of the East London streets for a breath of fresh countryside air hides the growing crises in thier own family. Memories of thier time as missionaries in South Africa and Botswana, of the terrible African tragedies that have shaped the rest of their lives, refuse to be put to rest and threaten to destroy the fragile peace they have built for themselves and their children.