Laura Thornby, independent, individual, and slightly exotic, manages her life with exquisite control. Her affairs are brief but delightful, her career fulfilling, and she copes with her two rather peculiar elderly relatives with wryness and humour.

But when she meets twenty-three-year-old Claude Bannister, struggling to be a writer, she is swept by an irresistible desire to interfere, manipulate, experiment with him - for his own good, of course.

What she does not foresee, however, are the possibilities that he, one day, may write well, and that she might fall in love.