Frost in May

Nanda Gray, the daughter of a Catholic convert, is nine when she is sent to the Convent of Five Wounds. Quick-witted, resilient, and eager to please, she accepts this closed world where, with all the enthusiasm of the outsider, her desires and passions become only those the school permits. Her only deviation from total obedience is the passionate friendships she makes. Convent life is perfectly captured-the smell of beeswax and incense; the petty cruelties of the nuns; the eccentricities of Nanda's school friends.

When Clara returns home from the convent of her childhood to begin life at a local girls' school, she is at a loss: although she has comparative freedom, she misses the discipline the nuns imposed and worries about keeping her faith in a secular world. Against the background of the First World War, Clara experiences the confusions of adolescence, its promise, its threat of change. She longs for love, yet fears it, and wonders what the future will hold. Then tragedy strikes and her childhood haltingly comes to an end as she realizes that neither parents nor her faith can help her.

The year is 1920. Clara Batchelor, the heroine of “The Lost Traveller”, is now an actress with a touring repertory company and is passionately in love with the wholly unsuitable Stephen Tye. When Stephen betrays her, Clara betrays herself by agreeing to marry Archie, the fiancé she discarded four years before. A friendship but not a love match, marriage is a desperate attempt by Clara to rekindle the safety of childhood. But neither of them is children anymore nor their dream sugar house begins to dissolve.