Joanna Trollope delves fearlessly into the emotional dynamics of family life - or rather, life in that ever-expanding unit, the stepfamily. There are the mothers - like Nadine, spurned, embittered, and trying desperately to hold on to her children any way she can; Elizabeth, the would-be stepmother, who only glimpses the shoals that lie ahead; Josie, the stepmother, who sees them all too clearly every day of her married life.

There are the men, like Matthew, who must live with another man's son and without his own children; and Tom, torn between his own desires and what he believes he owes his daughter. And then there are the children, all battling to find a place for themselves in this new order they haven't chosen.

With her sensitive eye and unerring ear, Trollope explores the hard-won truths and often harder-to-overcome difficulties of coping with present and former husbands and wives, and, above all, with other people's children.