Outline

In the wake of family collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The process of upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions - personal, moral, artistic, practical - as she endeavours to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city she is made to confront aspects of living she has until now avoided and to consider questions of vulnerability and power, death and renewal, in what becomes her struggle to reattach herself to and believe in life.

A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public enactment of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation that causes her to consider questions of acclaim, justice and the ultimate value of suffering.