It may well be that Keith Nearing is experiencing the summer of a lifetime. He is twenty years old, and his girlfriend Lily, after three months of freedom to experience other customs and other bodies, has come back to spend the holidays with him in a castle in Italy. It is the year 1970, at the height of the sexual revolution. In the castle, a group of young people swim with and against the tide. But in the summer there are always glimmering dangers, and a dying social order leaves no heir but an expecting widow, and between the death of one and the birth of the other, a great deal of water must flow