Book excerpt: Tom Stacey has a lot to think about these days. The bees for one. He hasn't seen any but he keeps hearing them, buzzing in the fridge at work, in the overhead lights, in the test equipment in the factory where he has spent the last fifteen years of his working life. They seem to be getting louder and more insistent. Then there is his search for Sarah McCarthy. Sarah was his first love when, as a teenager, he travelled around the country in the back of a horsebox with his grieving grandfather. But perhaps it isn't the bees or the past which is the problem. Perhaps it is his loneliness. Twenty-two dates with Happy Couples dating agency and nothing to show. Relationships are all about the details and there are just not enough boxes to tick on the agency's personal profile form. Armed with a wax model and a list of criteria, Tom sets out on a quest to create a personal profile to find his ideal match. On his journey, he meets people just like him, warm but unable to show it, lonely and unable to remedy it, the lost, the misplaced and the damaged.