This is the story of Christopher Isherwood's parents - their meeting in 1895, marriage in 1903, after his father had returned from the Boer War, and his father's death in an assault on Ypres in 1915, which left his mother a widow until her own death in 1960. As well as a family memoir, it is a social history of a pivotal time, and a portrait of a world which Isherwood was both shaped by, and rejected.

'There emerge from this book three remarkable characters, two highly edifying, one a writer of compelling talent' Catholic Herald

See also: Lions and Shadows