London

Most of the novel takes place in London, where the four main characters live comfortable upper-middle-class/wealthy lives. There is little specific description of the city, as most of the scenes taking place in London occur indoors at one of the characters' homes. The author does mention that Lydia runs into Alex on Malet Street in the first flashback when he gives her the Foucault book; this street is located in Bloomsbury near the University of London, which may be where Christine is studying for her PhD. What little physical description there is, however, is vivid: "The foggy air was tarry with fumes, cars sloughed past on the wet road monotonously, eighteenth-century house fronts loomed against the last light" (72).

In the present-day timeline, the characters briefly allude to the refugee crisis in Europe, seeing on the news "footage of events at Calais, where desperate migrants who wanted to...