This is an epic story about two men in love. And food. Set in China in 1924, Hong Kong in 1945, London in 1947, France in 1948 and Rome in the early 1950s Food, love and Victorian poetry. And indissoluble friendships. About seeing life as a newsreel and dissecting it in a doctoral thesis. A multi-sensory experience that includes eating leftover rice with warm milk and sugar for breakfast, the music of Ray Ventura, Italian Nuovo Realismo cinema, Baroque gardens, an evening at a gay pub in London's Soho, facing up to AIDS, Cucina Povera in Rome, the songs of Noel Coward, one hour in the Antico Caffè Greco, two hours in a prisoner of-war camp in Hong Kong, a scene from Virgil's Aeneid, and the poetry of Catullus.

Who can be both male and female, a steadfast coward, a knight with no quest, a doubting evangelist, a cook who doesn't want to eat and a poet who doesn't write a line?

Meet Manette not for answers but for what it means to be all these things and alive.