A touching, tender and witty novel about men and women and family life. Sophie Redlove has a crumbling Gothic mansion to restore, three children to manage, a distraught friend - as well as possums in the laundry at midnight. She loves her absent husband, Russell - but there's an importunate older man who's after her, a slightly sycophantic younger one, an angel and a Viking on the scene . . . And what the hell is Russell up to? And indeed what's the story in Sophie's gradually uncovered past that explains her dependence on those mysterious and vulnerable creatures - men? This enthralling novel takes a touching, tender and witty look at men and women and family life in the nineties, as Sophie struggles with the increasing chaos in her life.