Caradoc King is a well-known London literary agent, but he was born under another name. Adopted at eighteen months, he was brought up in a large and growing family. His adoptive mother, a complex woman, was unable to bond with her newly adopted son and treated him with a harshness bordering on cruelty. At the age of six he was sent to a boarding school run by two brilliantly eccentric brothers. But this happy time ended abruptly when his adoptive mother became a passionate Catholic and removed him from the school. From the age of eleven Caradoc was shuttled from one school to the next, later failing to fulfil his mother's wish that he should join a seminary. When he was fifteen he was informed that he had been adopted, and a year later his parents stopped paying his school fees and ejected him from the family. Caradoc began studying by post, and two years later he scraped into Oxford. On his first day there he met Philip Pullman, who was later to become his first client when he set up as a literary agent. Thirty years later Caradoc went in search of his natural family and his adopted sisters, and began to make sense of the mystery of his two absent mothers.