Jim Drever is a man apart, his closest relationship with the machinery he monitors in the distillery where he's worked for twenty years. He treats everything else with bleakly humorous contempt.

Jim Drever is a man apart, his closest relationship with the machinery he monitors in the distillery where he's worked for twenty years. He treats everything else with bleakly humorous contempt: his fading marriage, the increasingly bizarre behaviour of his teenage son; his daughter's impending wedding. He can deal with all that in his own way. It's the emails from Cuba, made up of letters from his dead mother, that threaten to bring down Jim's ordered world.