Sallie Declan, the heroine of this erudite and compelling little novel, is a 27-year-old American in London writing her PhD on Henry James's famous ghost story, The Turn of the Screw. Her friends joke that she is the i?nnocent Jamesian heroine let loose among the social complexities of old Europe; in reality, she is sad, friendless and adrift, having been invited into only one English home that of her well-meaning professor in the eight months since she stepped off the plane. Struggling with her thesis, and feeling increasingly bleak, Sallie decides to take some time out and see the real England. So she lands a job as a temporary nanny to the children of Charles Masters, a high-flying City lawyer who spends much of his time abroad. The children's mother, Sallie assumes, is dead.