Set in England over a summer in the aftermath of the second world war,
the book follows 16-year-old Robert Appleyard, son of a coal miner, who
leaves Durham village to head south and search for any work that isn't
coal mining. Eventually he finds himself in the old smuggling village of
Robin Hood's Bay. It's here he meets Dulcie Piper, a fiercely
independent woman, three times his elder, living with her protective
German Shepherd named Butler in an unusual cottage. Seeing Robert from
her yard, Dulcie offers him a room. The teenager plans on being there
for only a night but Dulcie is entirely different to anyone he has ever
met. Soon he finds himself trading his work for food and her infections
company. She is verbose, eloquent, lobster eating, sexually liberated,
motherly and foul-mouthed. He is a nationalist. She is a bohemian. As
well as feeding him, Dulcie introduces him to poetry: "mankind's way of
saying that we're not entirely alone." She introduces Robert to writers
he has never heard of - Lawrence, Whitman, Auden, Keats, Dickinson,
Bronte, Rossetti - and food he has never tasted. Eventually, Robert
finds an unpublished manuscript in a decaying shed. Dulcie reveals she
was once the lover of Romy Landau, a tragic German poet. The manuscript,
(also called The Offing), is his, and Dulcie's past begins to unfold. It
leads to the revelation of a tragic secret and a message from beyond the
grave.
