They married at St Mary Abbots, Kensington, in September 1948, the groom, the ambitious son of the editor of the Express ; the bride, the beautiful, somewhat rebellious daughter of blamelessly upstanding family of the provincial middle-middle class. A young man who was pushed forward by family expectation, a young woman pulled back. In this poignant and perceptive portrait of his parents' catastrophically acrimonious divorce, Rupert Christiansen tells the story of a generation. With the narrative power of the likes of The Ice Storm and Revolutionary Road , he chronicles the experience not just of one particular class, but of an era, when the loosening of the stays on middle-class marriage precipitated a rollercoaster decade of heartbreak and loss.