[2] Stella Benson, the first-person narrator, abruptly abandons her life in London to take a position as carer to Martin, the wheelchair-using teenage son of the wealthy and eccentric Madden family, in a farm near a small village in rural Sussex.

"[4] Emma Hagestadt, in a review for The Independent, describes the novel as "rustic satire" where "it's sometimes hard to spot the joke", and writes: "Cusk's loaded sentences can be a joy or a stumbling-block, depending on your state of mind.

"[3] James Urquhart, in a review for the Financial Times, calls the novel "richly comic", writing that "Domestic strains are Cusk’s speciality, and the prickly intimacy that Stella develops with Martin is both charming and slightly edgy.

Nicolas Pierre Boileau draws parallels between Stella and the protagonists of Cusk's two earlier novels, Saving Agnes and The Temporary, stating that all three are "young, successful female characters that, for some reason, have failed to live up to society's expectations and end up as marginal, yet conventional women."

He highlights the isolation caused by Stella's failure to identify with the novel's other female characters, writing that "Humiliation, disgust and the corporeality of womanhood are broached ... in a way that tends to attack most foundations of feminism by turning it into an ideology that is blind to the intimate, individual nature of woman's experience".