Julian Treslove, a former BBC worker, and Sam Finkler, a Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite very different lives, they've never lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik, a Czech more concerned with the wider world than with exam results. The recently widowed Libor and Finkler together with Treslove arrange an evening of dinner and reminiscence in Libor's grand London apartment. All three think back to a time before they had loved and lost, fathered children, dealt with devastating separations, or prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. That evening, as he is walking home, Treslove hesitates momentarily outside the window of an old violin dealer and is attacked. And from that moment, his whole sense of who and what he is begins to change...