Cyril Avery is not a real Avery - or at least that’s what his adoptive parents tell him. But if he isn’t a real Avery then who is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun Cyril is adrift in the world anchored only tenuously by his friendship with the glamorous and dangerous Julian Woodbead. At the mercy of fortune and coincidence he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from - and over his three score years and ten will struggle to discover an identity a home a country and much more.