Growing up in Wellington during the unsettled years of the First World War, Dot Butler is deserted by her father when she is eleven. At eighteen, following a spiritual impulse to seek safe and lasting love, she enters the convent. But her vocation fails.When her health breaks down, she find herself, a misfit, back in the changing world of the 20s.
In Sydney, where she joins her mother and relations, Dot tries various careers and samples the flappers' idea of a good time. Her longing for romance leads her into disappointing one-sided attachments until, working in St.Vincents' as a trainee nurse, she meets Chas, an English seaman in hospital with malaria, and their impulsive courtship becomes a headlong marriage. Five Years on, it is 1933, in the depths of the Depression. Work is scarce and money is short. Dot, restless as ever and now a mother, persuades her husband to take the family back to New Zealand. Still living in her fantasy of escape into perfect love, Dot sees home as a safe retreat. Instead, she finds conflict of every kind. Her brother is in jail, her unreliable, flirtatious sister is making eyes at Chas, and her mother is ageing and sick. Dot must face her worst fear and meet the father who walked away without even saying goodbye. The fear and anger she feels towards him fades and she learns he is not the villain she has imagined. Their reconciliation frees her to re-examine her own life and her future course as a mature woman.(Source: Author web site http://www.margaretsutherland.com sighted 15/11/07)
