Two girls dreading the start of the new school year: two years earlier, one had boasted to her friends that she’d had an a air with a teacher, who had subsequently left. Now, to the girls’ dismay, he is unexpectedly returning.

Another girl, by the sea, in her room or garden at home, struggling with an impossible love that captivated her during her participation in the school’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

A man labouring tirelessly to transform a huge, sloping field above a lychgate into a paradise garden. A woman sitting in her son’s garden, contemplating the sun sinking into the Southern Ocean.

What connects these random moments in disparate lives into a poignant, coherent whole?