Lem Gulliver (25, maths teacher), can't seem to leave home. His mother (46, courtroom artist) and step-father (49, AA patrol man), make no secret of the fact that he's become a cuckoo in the nest but since his girlfriend left him for a dog trainer, Lem has returned to his natural state of emotional drift. He can't understand how the people around him manage the plot of a grown-up life.

A Boy's Guide to Track and Field starts at Walthamstow and travels southbound towards Brixton; the reader is swept along with Lem in a review of the past which gradually accelerates into the present.