Tim Lott's parents, Jack and Jean, met at the Empire Snooker Hall, Ealing, in 1951, in a world that to him now seems 'as strange as China'. In this extraordinarily moving exploration of his parents' lives, his mother's inexplicable suicide in her late fifties and his own bouts of depression, Tim Lott conjures up the pebble-dashed home of his childhood and the rapidly changing landscape of postwar suburban England. It is a story of grief, loss and dislocation, yet also of the power of memory and the bonds of family love.