'Thirty years had passed since the 1950s and Sandra Rentle knows she is trapped in a fast-fading world of old money and snobbery. Her youthful attempt to evade the expectations of her parents had been nipped in the bud. She had since clung to the memory that she had been offered an escape by an ambitious young man from the margins of the city, far distant from the exclusive suburb of Belvedere. Her marriage to the serially unfaithful Jack had been subtly arranged and dutifully accepted; it had always been loveless. She had come only slowly to realise that Belvedere’s colonial self-certainty had long been little more than a delusion. Her only confidante, her spirited friend Lucy, had asserted her independence. Sandra knew that she too could still do so; she had been promised a new beginning, if only she had the resolve to seek it ...' (Publication summary)
