When an English priest takes over a small Scottish parish, not everyone is ready to accept him He makes friends with two local youths, Mark and Lisa, and clashes with a world he can barely understand The town seems to grow darker each night Fate comes calling and before the summer is out his quiet life is the focus of public hysteria Father David looks back to find a Lancashire childhood He remembers a lost father and a grand school for Catholic boys He finds 1960s Oxford in the heat of student revolt and recalls a choice he once made in the orange groves of Rome