If you take a devoted wife and mother and push her out of her cosy home in Australia into a whole series of crises in England, you can’t expect her to be unmarked by the experience. Rosalind has made a career out of caring for her family, but now the last of her three children is starting university and her husband Paul insists on her spending the summer in England with him, as a prelude to the changes he’s intending to make in all their lives.

But Paul’s careful plans go awry and Rosalind is left to face life in a strange country on her own. The friends she makes are not the friends he would have chosen for her. The choices she makes are not the ones he was hoping for. And she has to deal not only with the very serious problems of her three grown-up children, but also the discovery of her husband’s philandering, her own sudden success as an embroidery artist and her attraction to a very different kind of man . . .

In fact, no member of the Stevenson family remains unmarked by this summer’s events.