"Bad, mad, flame-haired cellist Stella, adulterous Jonathan and high-spirited sisters Ellen and Lydia Dent find their fates bound together through love, loss and literature in a dazzling tragicomedy.

Lydia is killed in a car accident, but she returns to her bereft sister as a benign ghost, who, none the less, comes to haunt the lives of those around her in unexpected ways: Jonathan Goldman, whose flat Lydia is running from when she is knocked down, his daughter Stella, who, on the same day, discovers that her father had been having an affair with the gladiatorial, teasing Sonia; Stella's genius painter-boy lover Izzy, whom she leaves behind as she flees to the arms of kindly Peregrine. Along with good stepmothers, bad mothers, strange professors and wicked monks, their lives collide in a breathtaking finale."