Joan Haggerty's first book is an early 1960s exploration of creative drama in an east end London, England elementary school.

As a young teacher, she discovers that children learn best through play; by acting out their interpretations of the classics and developing their own dramas, they come to embrace the institutions of theatre as their own.

Each contraction expands the protagonist's consciousness into the realm of touch and memory; the story unfolds in shifting dimensions of time and space as she re-lives the moments that bring the arrival of her daughter.

Here, miraculously, they blend in an intricate and intimate geography of time and place, people and personal mythologies in a gorgeously rendered novel.

Both an epic adventure and an interracial drama, this complex family saga begins one summer on Bowen Island and in Vancouver during the Depression and moves through Pearl Harbor, the evacuation of the Japanese and three generations into the 1980s.