Everyday tragedy comes face to face with the magical and inexplicable in this haunting, poignant, addictive novel, which travels effortlessly across three generations and through time.

This haunting, poignant and addictive story travels effortlessly across time, telling the tale of three generations of women who make the wrong choices and have to live with the consequences.

It opens in London in the present day, when an envious sibling comes to her sister's wedding. Back in the Swinging Sixties, the bridegroom's conventional English mother, Freida, behaves in a wholly unconventional way while working in a Knightsbridge hotel. Even before that, the seeds of tragedy are sown in the Fifties, when twelve-year-old Lucy first visits London and the same hotel. Precocious, impatient, wise beyond her years, Lucy becomes a go-between for two star-crossed lovers and then holds herself agonisingly responsible for what happens...

"Alice Hoffman's novels are a beguiling mix of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Everyday occurences... are transformed under her tender gaze into magical, heartbreaking fables... mesmerisingly graceful prose" - Daily Mail

"Hoffman's gift is to see how much of the mundane, how much of the everyday, is predicated upon a subtle, yet pervasive, sense of the magical" - Scotsman

"Its realism, combined with a refreshing lightness and its success in portraying emotion with empathy, draws the reader into a deep involvement with the book's appealing yet flawed characters" - Economist

"In this elegant and stunning novel, veteran heartstring-puller Hoffman (Here on Earth; Seventh Heaven) examines the lives of three women at different crossroads in their lives, tying their London-centered stories together in devastating retrospect." - Publisher's Weekly