Kay Dick’s story of a mother-daughter relationship is narrated from the point of view of the daughter – Cass – who is trying to understand her unconventional mother and to discover the identity of her father.

Cass’s mother, Sunday, is an inveterate romantic. She is obsessive, dramatic, promiscuous and thoroughly obstinate, given to romantic whimsy and a complete disregard of reality. She distorts the world and the lives of those about her, living up to the origin of her name: “the child that is born on the Sabbath day is bonny and bright and blithesome and gay.” Between the luxurious frivolity of Sunday’s milieu in the late 1920s and the hard facts of the early 1930s, is the modal lodestar of Cass’s experience of Swiss bourgeois life: her mother’s demi-mondaine circle and the men in her life, from Max the Dutch stepfather, Charlie the charmer, Renaldo the amorous Count to Simon her final fling in middle age.