Mary Stewart's new story is lit with the special magic of people and of place that are the hallmarks of a famous author's best work. In a series of deft brush-strokes she brings her heroine, Perdita - a beautiful twenty-three-year-old - to vivid life. As secretary to the redoubtable children's novelist, Cora Gresham, Perdita's job carries her to the Canary Islands in search of local colour for a new masterpiece, and a peaceful house in which to write it.

But the house is already occupied - once by the past, and the haunting memory of what happened there a century ago; and now by its present owners - very much alive - a famous playwright and his research assistant, Michael. In the fierce beauty of the volcanic landscape, in the persons of Perdita and Michael, past and present meet, violently. The weird, semi-deserted island of Lanzarote is the scene for the collison which re-shapes the lives of the young lovers, as it did a hundred years ago.