As a college student Michael visited Egypt Hill, the curiously named estate of his roommate+s family, for a garden party, and in one afternoon met a host of eccentric characters who have stayed with him ever since. Years later he decides a return to Egypt Hill would be an ideal sojourn-a place where he can escape the chaos at home that is destroying his marriage, his fashionably old townhouse, and possibly his worrisomely taciturn young son, Hamish. But now nothing in Egypt Hill is as it was, or at least how it once seemed.