London, 1945. The war is over, the future is waiting and a generation is preparing to remake Britain. 

Anthony is young, ambitious and determined to find his place in a country still rebuilding itself. Around him gathers a circle of friends, lovers, dreamers and rivals – people who believe that politics can change lives, that journalism can shape the national conversation and that history is something they might help write.

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As the decades unfold, their lives become entangled with the story of modern Britain itself. Governments rise and fall. Old certainties disappear. Friendships deepen, fracture and endure. Marriages are tested. Ambitions are fulfilled, abandoned or betrayed. And beneath the public events that dominate the headlines lies a more intimate question: how should we love? Spanning more than sixty years, Rough Music is a rich, witty and deeply humane novel about friendship, politics, family and the complicated relationship between private lives and public history. Through the fortunes of one generation, Alan Humm offers a panoramic portrait of post-war Britain and the people who helped shape it.