My mother Emma, when she was a girl, dreamed of love, and she got it. She got the days and nights of bliss and the heady fragrance-filled summers, and two more daughters.

Emma dreamed of love, and she got it. And, finally she got the moments of sick despair when she went out into the garden at night and rubbed leaves and dirt into her face and hair. She stood in the dark street and watched night after night the house where we stayed with Claudio and Stella while she was left alone.

I was thirteen. My life, which I’d feared would be ordinary, had proved to be full of wonders, and I expected that more would come to me in the future.

I’d witnessed a bat draw its last breath. I’d seen my sister, in the moonlight, lift up her voice in song. A red butterfly had blossomed from my own body. I had ridden as fast as the wind.

I had drawn blood with my first kiss.

In this sensuous, evocative novel, Joanne Horniman meditates on the forces between sisters, between parent and child, between lovers. She captures and releases the richness of each successive moment in layers of circling stories and vivid images, on themes of love, guilt, secrets and the mystery of growing up and growing older.