This wonderful novel tells the story of seventeen year old Cassandra and her extraordinary family, who live in not-so-genteel poverty ina ramshackle old English castle. Cassandra's eccentric father is a writer whose first book took the literary world by storm but he has sincs failed to write a single word and now spends most of his time reading detective novels from the village library. Cassandra's elder sister, Rose - exquisitely beautiful, vain and bored - despairs of her family's circumstances and determines to marry their affluent American landlord, Simon regardelss of the fact she does not love him. She is in turns helped and hindered in this by their bohemian stepmother Topaz, an artist's model and nudist who likes to commune with nature. Fianlly there is Stephen, dazzlingly handsome and hopelessly in love with Cassandra. In this maelstrom Cassandra strives to hone her writing skill. She fills three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries, which candidly chronicle the great changes that take place within the castle's walls, and her own first descent into love. By the time she pens her final entry, she has captured the heart of the reader in one of literature's most enchanting entertainments.