"Summer 1955: Lillian Oberon is young, beautiful, and married to the wealthy and handsome Charles Oberon. She is also the mistress of Cloudesley, a lavish country estate, and the stepmother to a young boy she loves dearly. But not long after her nuptials, she begins to feel that she is just another of her husband's possessions, an objet d'art captured within the manor walls. Bound by familial duty and love, she tries to make peace with her unfulfilling...

Still grieving the death of her prematurely delivered infant, Lila finds a welcome distraction in renovating a country house she's recently inherited. Surrounded by blueprints and plaster dust, though, she finds herself drawn into the story of a group of idealistic university grads from thirty years before, who'd thrown off the shackles of bourgeois city life to claim the cottage and rely only on each other on the land. But utopia-building can be...