A woman who's known for years she married the wrong man decides to take charge of her life. A lustreless marriage drives Alice back to her former life as an artist. Her husband, a prosaic lawyer, cannot comprehend that for Alice, art, like music, has the power to take her to a rare place, a different world. He dismisses it as just romantic nonsense. She joins a fashionable London set of artists, dealers and rich collectors, but quickly realises that she and they are poles apart. Looking past their glittering exterior, she sees them as cynical self-seekers and poseurs, for whom art is nothing but a passport to social acclaim and money. Faithful to her musician father's golden rule to 'play it from the heart', she persists in swimming against the tide, starts an affair with a younger man and gains revealing insights into her own identity. In exploring the conflict between two opposing attitudes to art and life, the novel looks back at Alice's early years and family history. It ranges widely over time and place: London, rural Kent, Provence, Italy, Berlin, and, by way of her father's memoirs, gives a picture of what life was like for Jews in Czechoslovakia and Germany during the Nazi era.