Hugh Thurne is a diplomat in love with a young Venetian woman when his best friend's widow, Violet Mancroft, arrives in Venice from England. Violet is still absorbed by grief but she is also troubled by the direction her relationship with Hugh might now take. Violet is also preoccupied by anxiety for her son, Robert, who has fallen in love with Gloria Venier, a young Grand Canal girl. Unlike Violet, Giacomo Venier is amused by his daughter's fledgling relationship - but he is dying, leaving his wife Valentina to maintain their dilapidated palace and face financial ruin, and to bring up their teenage children alone. From the English coast to Venice and Britain's dominions in the East, this is a novel about empires and their crises, about the desolation and the hope after the Great War, about death, time and memory, and innocent - and less innocent - love. And it is a passionate study of the crisis of societies in peace and in war, and of the bewildering perversities of continually reawakening love.