Globe-trotting Jess comes of age in postwar London, when the world seems to be opening up to young women. But when the result of an affair with her anthropology professor is her beautiful, golden daughter Anna, things change. Anna is sweet and happy, but as she grows it becomes clear that she has intellectual delays. So Jess turns away from the wide world and devotes herself to mothering her child. Softly plotted so as to be just barely a novel; still, it's an affecting meditation on difference. Along the course of Jess' life, she interacts with a group of people in an experimental psychiatric hospital, as well as classmates of Anna's with various cognitive deficits, and through all of these encounters she examines their worlds with an anthropologist's eye.
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