In Cambridge the Revd Thomas Cavendish, a celibate and irreproachable university don in his mid-fifties, appears destined to become master of the college.

In India, 15-year-old Kitty is becoming bored with ex-colonial life, and at the same time repelled by the poverty she sees nearby; she longs to return to the England she left as a young child.

The second half of the book concerns Thomas Cavendish's growing obsession with Kitty after he sees her from his window, as she stands on a bridge over the river.

According to The Guardian, the 'highly stylised Air and Angels differs from her earlier novels in being 'more psychologically focussed, more poetically written',[7] Christopher Wordsworth wrote "Victorian or early Georgian?

"[5] Laura Cumming from The Observer praises the novel as being 'light as a feather but as powerful as flight', she writes that 'Hill deploys old time conventions to express the astonishment of unconventional love with metaphors cut from the pattern...Her style is a gentle story-book prose, barely troubled by anything as adult as a dialogue, but the adult shock of amour fou is brilliantly evoked out of subtleties...Hill can make emotional eloquence out of a glass of sherry or a pair of sensible shoes, and Air and Angels, with its homage to Donne, is a passionate celebration.