David loves Marie. But Marie is not overly interested in the waiter shambling helplessly around her. Then David makes a discovery. In the drawer of an old bedside table, he finds a manuscript. The novel appears to date from the Fifties, and tells of a love, deep and pure, the likes of which are practically unknown in the cynical, post-modern twenty-first century. Marie is enthralled by the novel and, believing David to be its author, offers the manuscript to a publishing house without his knowledge. Lila, Lila becomes a bestseller – and Marie David's lover. He would like nothing more than to tell her the truth, but: Her love had been built on a slight deception, the removal of which would have swept away that love's very fundament. This is an outcome that David intends to avoid at any cost. Meanwhile, what began as a tiny lie begins to snowball into an ever greater disaster. Love, betrayal and death – such are the themes of the bestseller, which begins to control David's life in a way that he would never have imagined possible.