Ludwig Unger's life held such promise. His parents were artists and, from an early age, his own musical genius had marked him out for a stellar career in the world's concert halls. In his mother's imagination, Ludwig is already on the way to surpassing her most ambitious dreams for him. But in reality, and for now, he's playing in local cocktail bars and the two of them are living alone in a storm-lashed clifftop cottage in East Anglia. As the forceful winter seas bash away at the coastline, and Ludwig plunks away at the piano, he begins to tell a woman his story: a story of beauty and decay, of a child's faith and parental betrayal, and of the importance, in the end, of self-sacrifice.

When Ludwig Unger returns to his hometown after a decade, he arrives with a plastic bag filled with his mother's ashes and little else. He was there to make amends with his lonely past, to say good-bye to the familial ghosts that still haunted him.

Praise for Tommy Wieringa:

'The best contemporary novels are a quest made out of literary and moral ambition. Those who have successfully pursued this Holy Grail in recent times are Bolaño with his The Savage Detectives, Sebald in Austerlitz, Coetzee with Disgrace and the late Philip Roth. From now on, to that august list must be added the name of Tommy Wieringa.'