Lily Page, fifty years of age, biddable, amenable, has lived her entire life in the family home in North London’s Islington, brought up after her mother’s early death by her indomitable aunt and classicist father with an implied sense of obligation. An abortive love affair years before has been her only deviance from a prescriptive path.

But it is 1983 and change is in the air, social, political and personal. When her elderly father dies, Lily is conflicted by a sense of freedom that she feels ill-equipped to embrace after a lifetime of compliance. Meeting by chance a mercurial young woman, Stella Fox, and a middle-aged failing actor, Hugh Murray, she is drawn to the pair by the prospect of filling a vacuum in her life that she fears. She feels a maternal concern for Stella and with Hugh craves a relationship that will render her, a very ordinary woman by her own reckoning, status to defy her sense of insignificance.

But as the year passes, doubts about the integrity of both Stella and Hugh begin to surface and Lily, amidst a changing world, needs to shake off the hooks of the past and the snares of the present to define her own future.