Set in 1940s wartime England, the trilogy follows young Vera, who leaves
her cultivated Midlands home to become a nurse in a military hospital
and is catapulted into adulthood through unorthodox love entanglements
with both men and women, two illegitimate children, and finally
emigration to Australia, where, from her new vantage point--now a doctor
and writer--she looks back on her life's journey. Combining the beauty
of Virginia Woolf with the spare, heartbreaking insightfulness of Jean
Rhys, the trilogy is both a literary tour de force and an accessible,
universal portrait of a woman in search of sustaining love.
The concluding volume, The Georges' Wife, is published here for the
first time in the US. The first two volumes have long been out of print.
North American readers can now experience "the most ambitious and
accomplished work in Jolley's oeuvre" (J. M. Coetzee).