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Ever thought about all the people who lived in your house before you did? Well, come meet their type in this enthralling history of an ordinary British family home that digs up layer upon layer of past lives to illuminate our own times, our family life and our heritage. This is the biography of a house, the history of a home. It's an ordinary house, an ordinary home, and ordinary people have lived in it for over a century. But, start to explore what they did, who they were, what they believed in, what they desired and they soon become as remarkable, as complicated, as fascinating as anyone. That is exactly what Julie Myerson set out to do. She lives in a typical Victorian terraced family house, of average size, in a typical Victorian suburb (Clapham) and she loves it . She wanted to find out how much those who preceded her loved living there, so she spent hours and hours in the archives at the Family Record Office, the Public Record Office at Kew, local council archives and libraries across the country. Like an archaeologist, she found herself blowing the dust off files that no-one had touched since the last sheet of paper in them was typed.

One bleak, late winter's day, Julie Myerson finds herself in a graveyard, looking for traces of a young woman who died nearly two centuries before. As a child in Regency England, Mary Yelloly painted an exquisite album of watercolours that uniquely reflected the world she lived in. But Mary died at the age of 21, and when Julie comes across this album, she is haunted by the potential never realised, the barely-lived life cut short. And most of all, she is reminded of her own child. Because only days earlier, Julie and her husband locked their eldest son out of the family home. He was just 17. How could it have come to this? After a happy growing-up, it had taken only a matter of months for this bright, sweet, good-humoured boy to completely lose his way and propel his family into daily chaos. He had discovered cannabis and was now smoking it everyday - and nothing they could say or do, no help they could offer, seemed to reach him. And Julie - whose emotionally fragile relationship with her own father had left her determined to love her children better - had to accept that she was, for the moment at least, powerless to bring back the boy she had known.

It's the summer holidays. And suddenly there's a strange boy at the bottom of Flynn's garden. Soon, she and her wayward brother Sam are walking out of the house in the middle of a hot summer's night and crossing four fields to find him again. But as well as the boy, Flynn and Sam find a whole gang of runaway kids. There's Diana, who's just had a baby. There's Mouse, who's only five and likes to set fire to things. And there is the boy himself, who stirs up feelings in Flynn that she's never felt before. But there's also someone else - the unspeakably malign and terrifying presence they're all running from. Escaping him, they stumble on an amazing and extraordinary house by a waterfall, a house which seems to offer safety and meets their every desire and need - or does it? The youngest character in the novel is one day old, and the oldest only seventeen. But the themes that lie at the heart of this ferociously original story are as adult, unsettling and universal as those of Julie Myerson's other novels.

This book begins with snow, the story of you. It is a freezing room in a student house, a sagging mattress on the floor, and two people, one 19, the other 20, kissing passionately, all night. It is to this scene that, 20 years later, Rosy, the narrator of Julie Myerson's astonishing new novel, returns obsessively. She has just lost a child in a terrible, careless accident, and Tom, her partner, has taken her to Paris to forget about things, to start again. The Story of You is an account of a woman trying to get by as a mother, a wife, while falling in love with a man from a memory.