Angela MacGregor has lived a life of obsessions. In middle age she started to find some peace from those obsessions in her self-imposed exile in the mountain country in the Hunter Valley. That peace is shattered when a bushfire threatens to destroy everything and everybody she has come to love. The fire forces Angela to not only leave her home, but to come to terms with her literary obsessions and the price she has paid building and then losing her academic career. The past is always present in this debut novel by Glenn Stuart Beatty. There is Angela's past, lost in the land of words and ideas and there is the past contained in the secrets of a small community forced to face its buried truths uncovered by the ashes of a devastating bushfire and ghosts in Angela's head. As an academic, Angela was obsessed with many things: the writing of Randolph Stow (her first literary love) and later James Joyce. Her life collides with the lives of a dissolute group of writers she is researching in 1940's Sydney and a young woman's suicide while, at the same time, she lives a life of regret about the things she did when she was young. All of these events of the past are brought back to life as Angela confronts a devastating bushfire that will change everything forever.