Bright, bookish Oscar Lowe has escaped the urban estate where he was raised and made a new life for himself amid the colleges and spires of Cambridge. He has grown to love the quiet routine of his life as a care assistant at a local nursing home, where he has forged a close friendship with the home's most ill-tempered resident, Dr. Paulsen. But when he meets and falls in love with Iris Bellwether, a beautiful and enigmatic medical student at King's College, Oscar is drawn into her world of scholarship and privilege, and soon becomes embroiled in the strange machinations of her brilliant but troubled brother, Eden, who believes he can adapt the theories of a forgotten Baroque composer to heal people with music. Eden's self-belief knows no bounds, and as he draws his sister and closed circle of friends into a series of disturbing experiments to prove himself right, Oscar realises the extent of the danger facing them all...
Young Owen Lowe left home and school at 17 to work as a care assistant at a nursing home in Cambridge, England. While walking home after work through the grounds of the University, he hears some music in a church that draws him in to listen closer. There he meets Eden and Iris Bellwether, sibling students and is quickly drawn into their lives and their circle of friends. What follows is a study of the power of music to heal and the psychology of a man who believes he can use his music to heal people. The paths of all the characters merge to a heartbreaking conclusion.
