'A work of alarming talent. It is a challenge to find enough good words to stretch across a description of this novel.' — Karen Lamb, The Age

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.

Marie King is fifty-nine, recently divorced, and has lived a rather privileged suburban existence. And though her three adult children have moved out, they are telling her what to wear, making her buy smarter furniture, and urging her to sell the family home and with it her beloved garden. Marie feels trapped.

On a drunken whim, Marie gets a tattoo - the beginning of an unexpected friendship with her tattoo artist, Rhys. Her children are mortified by their mother's transformation, but have their own self-absorbed challenges to deal with: workplace politics, love affairs and the real-estate market. Before long, Rhys has introduced Marie to a side of her city that she never encountered before and she begins to realise that the affluent world she has left behind has kept her in its clutches for far too long.