On a midsummer's evening in Hampshire, England, deep in a countryside washed in mauve pink and roses in bloom, the Palmer family is playing a dinner party game: what kind of society would you accept without knowing your place in it? But the question of justice gives way to the more pressing problem of the Palmer's eccentric mother, Frieda, an eminent author and thinker who has fled them and her old life to take up residence in a remote, crumbling old hotel by the sea in Exmoor.

To her three children, Daniel, Rosemary, and Gogo, Frieda has always been a powerful and puzzling figure. What is next for this mother of theirs, who late in life developed a passion for Wagnerian opera, abandoned her Saab in a traffic jam, and sued Her Majesty's government over tax returns? What is she plotting now? What will she do with her money? Will she favor her half-Guyanese grandson over her own children? Why has she disappeared? Has the dark spirit of Exmoor finally driven her mad?