"Down the road from a working-class British pub, along a narrow brick alley, you might find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and invite you inside. At first, you won't want to leave. Later, you'll find that you can't. Every nine years, the residents of Slade House extend a unique invitation to someone who's different or lonely: a precocious teenager, a recently divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really...

At a dinner party in the posh London suburb of Greenwich, Miles Garth suddenly leaves the table midway through the meal, locks himself in an upstairs room, and refuses to leave. An eclectic group of neighbors and friends slowly gathers around the house, and the story of Miles is one told from the points of view of four of them: a woman in her forties called Anna, a man in his sixties called Mark, a woman in her eighties called May, and a ten-year-old...

Sometimes it takes hundreds of years to make a single connection. Five stories transport the reader into the lives of people desperate for human connection, ranging from World War II Poland to a near-future Italy where a scientist learns how time and the human brain are connected. While not all human connections are successful, each attempt affects countless lives over the course of the centuries that pass within these pages.