Searching for solitude and a space to re-create herself away from her large Sydney family, a twenty-one-year-old woman embraces the anonymous pleasures of a foreign language and city. In doing so she launches herself into the madness of a wealthy Parisian household — and while she expects to be treated as an equal, she comes to realise she is little more than a servant.

In this, her first novel, Fiona McGregor has given us a funny and occasionally painful account of the search for identity and the pressures of family and place which shape us.