Beth Lowe has been sent a parcel. Inside is a letter informing her that her long-estranged mother has died & a scrapbook Beth has never seen before. Entitled The Book of Summers its stuffed with photographs & mementos complied by her mother to record the seven glorious childhood summers Beth spent in rural Hungary. It was a time when she trod the tightrope between separated parents & two very different countries; her bewitching but imperfect Hungarian mother & her gentle reticent English father; the dazzling house of a Hungarian artist & an empty-feeling cottage in deepest Devon. & it was a time that came to the most brutal of ends the year Beth turned sixteen. Since then Beth hasnt allowed herself to think about those years of her childhood. But the arrival of The Book of Summers brings the past tumbling back into the present; as vivid painful & vital as ever.