This book is based on an exchange of letters between Jane Sinclair's parents Jean Langley, artist, and John Sinclair, music critic 1960-62, when the author was five and her mother followed her lover, Arthur Boyd, to London, and took her daughter with her. Set in England and Australia, at a time when their friends John and Sunday Reed were high-profile arts patrons at their property Heide, a period of sexual liberation and a flowering of the arts, the complex relationship between Jane's parents emerges through an exchange of long, often heartbreaking letters and journal entries.