Harry Clewe is odd. He's shy and nervous, tall and thin, with a shock of red hair. But women like him.

After a bruising experience as a teacher in Africa, he has come to the mountains of Snowdonia for some peace and quiet. One day, as he's driving to visit his beloved little sister Lizzie, he stops to pick up an attractive blonde hitch hiker... and his life will never be the same again.

A desperate obsession ends in tragedy. And for the next four decades, meek, impressionable Harry Clewe is shaped and re-shaped by a bizarre and ultimately dangerous succession of women. Driven from crisis to crisis, from one catastrophe to the next, he knows joy, terror, despair... and finally, the horror of his own worst impulses.