The narrator of Enduring Love is a science writer and broadcaster called Joe Rose. As the novel opens, he is sharing a picnic with his long-standing girlfriend, Clarissa. At the far end of the field two farmhands are working. A doctor is driving his car along the adjacent lane; a young man named Jed Parry is walking there. All of these lives are interrupted -- and subsequently entwined -- when the balloon lurches towards them.