A title that begins with six children playing in a garden by the sea and follows their lives as they grow up and experience friendship, love and grief at the death of their beloved friend Percival.

This is the story of Francis Andrews, a young man whose betrayal of his fellow smugglers has left a man dead. Fearing vengeance, he flees and takes refuge in the house of a young, isolated woman who persuades him to give evidence against his accomplices in court.

Agent Number 67, nicknamed Pygmy for his diminutive size, arrives in the United States from his totalitarian homeland. Along with his fellow operatives, he is planning something big, something truly, truly awful, to bring this big dumb country's fat inhabitants to their knees.

Presenting a selection of her writing, the author covers more than a decade of her thought, which ranges over a diversity of subjects giving a measure of the focus of her interests.