When a young boy's father dies unexpectedly the boy realises he never really knew his father as a person, only as a father, and hence questions his own identity. The book traces the lives of the father and the boy through alternate chapters and reveals the similarity between their experiences. Eventually the boy (now a mature man with his own history) discovers the person his father was through a series of letters written to a secret lover and how his father's life could well have been his own.