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Plot summary

In July, 1962, Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, young people deeply in love and of drastically different backgrounds (he's the son of a schoolmaster and a brain-damaged woman, whereas she is the musically gifted daughter of a wealthy industrialist and an Oxford philosophy lecturer), have just been married and are spending their honeymoon in a small hotel on the Dorset seashore. (See Chesil Beach.)

During the course of an evening, both reflect upon their upbringing and the prospect of their futures. Edward is sexually motivated and though intelligent has a taste for rash behaviour and Florence, bound by the social code of another era, is terrified of sexual intimacy: eventually this leads to an experience that will change their relationship irrevocably.

The novel focuses upon the couple's different personalities and attitudes and the development of their love in the dawning of a sexual awakening in 1960s Britain.