A middle-aged Englishman, whose father committed suicide when the man was thirteen years old, comes across some letters his father had sent from the trenches of World War One. Certain words and phrases in these letters reveal a side of his father he had never suspected when he was growing up. This sends him on a quest to find out more about his father’s life. As he digs deeper and deeper into his family’s past, he uncovers a world he realizes he had never understood, could never even have imagined. Just beneath the surface of the apparently quiet, civilized, well-bred world of the family he had known as a child, there was a completely different reality, a parallel universe of suppressed loves and hates, sexual deviations and appallingly violent actions, involving not only his parents and grandparents and the rest of his family, but also himself.
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