The opening line informs the reader that this book takes place in "the summer before the world stopped." This is a reference to the Covid pandemic which put much of the world into a state of quarantine in 2020. Specifically, the time of the novel is August 2019. It has been ten months since the death of the narrator's mother, and this is the stimulus for a trip to London. The unnamed narrator who checks into a hotel in Clerkenwell bears a very strong resemblance to the author of the novel. The story commences with a photograph of a note written by the author on Mother's Day 1993 promising to never make her actual mother a character in a book she writes. This becomes the complex crux upon which the narrative turns. The line between the fiction of a novel and the non-fiction of a memoir grows increasingly blurry to the point that at times even the narrator herself is not sure whether she is real or imagined.
There is no plot or even a clearly defined storyline. The visit to London in 2019 is stimulated by the narrator's grief over her mother's recent death. The visit in 2019 is also the stimulus for a series of memories that cover a much longer timeline. These memories of the mother initiate a series of interior monologues presented almost in a stream-of-consciousness manner. For instance, the conditions of staying in the hotel in 2019 prompted her to muse on how "mother and I had different philosophies of hotel life." A visit to the Millennium Bridge and ride on the Millennium Inclinator, on the other hand, invites the narrator to go on a more self-reflective examination of her life as an author while she interacts with a young mother and child.
The visit to London in the unusually hot summer before the onset of the Covid quarantine serves primarily as a point of reference that stimulates memories and contemplation. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear through the intrusion of the author into the narrator's tale that despite protestations that this book is not a memoir by the author recalling memories of her own recently deceased mother, its presentation as a work of fiction is just an attempt to keep the promise made by the author in the note which prefaces the beginning of the narrator's story. Ultimately, it becomes impossible to deny the plausible suspicion that the author herself has broken that promise not to make her mother a character in a memoir by making her mother a character in a work of fiction.
Along the way as the narrator traverses across various sights in London, the reader learns small details about the author and her mother ranging from a hatred of modern art to her parents being complete opposites except for a shared inability to manage money passages which suggest the entire story is a work of meta-fiction in which the narrator knows she is just a thinly disguised semi-autobiographical representation of the author. The narrator sums up the meandering and digressive nature of the book that is her own story by observing "I kept walking. It’s not much of a plot. As a fictional character, I do very little of consequence."
