A complex film about follows the lives of people in a small village in northern England just after the First World War. The main character, a young boy afflicted with epilepsy, has to cope with a father gassed in the war and a mother keen to protect him from too much reality. His hero is an educated single man in the town, played by Liam Nesson, whose claim to fame is a vast collection of books. The boy forms a friendship with a slightly-older teenager girl called Win but the entire movie revolves around his discovery that the Neeson character is carrying on an affair with a married woman in the village. What plot there is very hard to follow and the abrupt end of the movie suggests the director had no real idea of how to resolve the relationship between the boy and the girl while resolving the relationship of the Neeson character and his lover, played by Natasha Richardson, in a way that assumes the mores of the late 20th century applied in England in the 1920s.