"At forty-eight, Eloise McAllister loves living alone. Successful, assertive and resolutely private, her days pass in a blur of adrenaline, especially when she gambles the company fortunes on a tip from an old lover. Her mother Joan is eighty, a gifted pianist denied the delights of performance by old age and arthritic joints." "Both women know that Joan can't live alone indefinitely. Eloise doesn't want strangers taking care of her mother, but she knows that doing so herself would be worse - so she has arranged a place for her at The Albany, a home for the elderly housed in a magnificent Victorian mansion." "Before Joan moves in, Eloise takes her on one last trip to South Africa, where a shopping centre is all that remains of the farm where Joan's brother lies buried. Joan's mind has been playing extraordinary tricks on her for some time. In the dust and heat, long-interred family spirits begin to stir, and back in London she escapes the tedium of institutional life by bringing these stories alive in her mind. Soon she has created a drama more real than anything her doctors could imagine."