 In an October 2006 poll in "The Observer", it was named joint third for the best work of British and Commonwealth fiction of the last 25 years (along with Ian McEwan's "Atonement", Penelope Fitzgerald's "The Blue Flower", Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Unconsoled", and Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children").On his eighty-first birthday, retired homosexual writer Kenneth Toomey is asked by the Archbishop of Malta to assist in the process of canonisation of Carlo Campanati, the late Pope Gregory XVII and his brother-in-law.Toomey subsequently works on his memoirs, which span the major part of the 20th century.