When the narrator of Childish Loves inherits a colleague Peter's writings on Lord Byron, he finds himself acting as a literary sleuth. Sorting through boxes of manuscripts he reads between the lines of these scandalous, Byron-inspired stories, meets with the Society for the Publication of the Dead, and tracks down people from Peter's past in an effort to untangle rumour from reality. In the process, he crafts a masterful story-within-a-story that turns on uncomfortable questions about childhood and sexual awakening, innocence and attraction, while exploring the lives of three very different writers and their brushes with success and failure in both literature and life.