A Start in Life

'Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.'

Dr Ruth Weiss, an academic, is beautiful, intelligent and lonely. Studying the heroines of Balzac in order to discover where her own childhood and adult life has gone awry, she seeks not salvation but enlightenment.

As she revisits her London upbringing, her friendships and doomed Parisian love affairs of years gone by, she begins to wonder whether perhaps there might still be a chance for a new start in life . . .