This passionate and gripping novel of ideas and sex, of music and art, of creative play and deadly psychopathology, refuses to provide easy exits from contemporary confrontations and anxieties. Depicted in a series of vividly dramatic tableaux and narrated from different points of view, the novel focuses primarily upon an independent-minded woman who rejects the religious and moral pieties of the day. Sometimes at the edge, sometimes in the centre of the bilingual community she inhabits, she plays dangerously with temptation and seduction, risking her marriage to a minister whose beliefs she does not share, alienating her daughter, and salvaging her damaged heart.