When Percy and Betty Harlency abandon their seedy Streatham pub for the Copper Kettle Tearoom in Kent, life for their daughter, April, changes dramatically. She is befriended by the wonderfully dangerous Ruby, whose red hair reflects her taste for flames and by Mr Greenridge whose wife's death and increasing attachment to April seem more than coincidental.
A rare evocation of a 1950s childhood, laced with the tragic and the bizarre, this is an exceptional and magical novel.