From one of our finest writers - winner of the Miles Franklin, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Prime Minister's Literary Award

Anne Day's Review

This is a marvellous read about a marriage that could  and  should have worked out between T. S. Eliot and his wife Vivienne Haig-Wood. Instead of which Eliot manages to persuade those around him that Vivienne is not of sound mind and she is sent off to an asylum where he never visits her.

The book begins in London. June 1940. Vivienne, quite within a calm state of mind, is about to affect a daring escape from Northumberland House, the insane asylum, where she has been held for the past four years

She has been told there is an old law, that if a person can break out of an asylum and stay free for thirty days, they cannot be made to go back. But closing in on Vivienne is a young Detective, Stephen Minter, with a hidden past of his own, who has orders to track her down

To tell you more would be to give the story away. All I will say is that it is a poignant and moving novel about beginnings, endings and reinvention.