"Seventeen-year-old Thea lives a strange and sheltered life with her mother, Nalia, retired opera singer and Holocaust survivor. A virtual prisoner of her mother's obsessive love, Thea escapes with a mysterious and suave friend of her father's and is taken to the remote island on which he lives. "The rule is this," she says. "I am to pretend that my other life does not exist. And yet, pretending, it seems to be true."".

"What Thea discovers on the island is that the house in which she grew up - with its gates and padlocks and dogs - has been replaced by a prison of a different kind. "All my life," she says, "I have noticed keys. I like to know where they fit, how they work. 'What do you need your own keys for?' my mother would shout. 'When you're old enough for keys, you'll be old enough to understand a lot of things.'""--BOOK JACKET.