One house, five families, four and a half decades; from the 1950s to the present. In this compelling, engaging and deeply moving novel, the successive occupants of a three-bedroomeed terraced house go about the complicated business of keeping themselves and a home together in a place that the rest of the world knows as Belfast, but to them is just 'the town'. Things happen that might happen anywhere, and things happen that could happen nowhere else, sometimes as noises off, and sometimes on the front doorstep. But whatever happens, they get up the next day, like everyone else, and carry on.

There is Stella, haunted by the thought that she will die young, like her mother, and unfulfilled; Rodney, clinging to the dream of a cosmopolitan life; young Tan, faced with the dilemma of where he begins and friendship ends; Catriona, watching her husband and children undergo a strange transformation; Mel, pushing thirty, living with Toni, wondering whether they will ever share more than ownership of an industrial vacuum cleaner. And always, across the street, there is Ivy. One family moves out, another moves in. This novel is about continuity and renewal in the face of life's disruptions. It is about the traces that, sometimes without our knowing, we leave behind.