[1] The novel was the first in the author's Vera Wright trilogy, preceding Cabin Fever (1990) and The Georges' Wife (1993).

During World War II Vera Wright is a young nurse training in a London hospital.

Vera's rite of passage is lovingly portrayed as, with great imagination and control, the novel dips and sweeps between the present and the past, one incident recalling another, much as memory functions...Jolley's fans will recognise with pleasure the eccentric incidents and the array of quirky characters.."[2] Writing about which Australian novel a reader should pick next for The Guardian, Carrie Tiffany chose this book and stated: "It is proof of a fine novel when its characters enter your spirit as you are reading and take up residence there.

Film can't achieve this, or theatre, or visual art; perhaps music gets closest.

It's only the novel that can show you the grain of another's soul...Read Elizabeth Jolley's My Father's Moon.