This bittersweet coming-of-age novel is a beautiful evocation of the student milieu of northern Europe in the 1960s - a time of new ideas and enormous social and political changes. Inger, a bright young woman from Fredrikstad, graduates from high school, spends a year in Edinburgh working as an au pair for a bourgeois Scottish family, then returns to Norway to study at the University of Oslo. There, crushes, clandestine relationships and the exhilarating first signs of the Scandinavian gay and lesbian liberation movement mark Inger's struggle to come to terms with her sexuality. At the same time she begins to see more clearly how her parents' alcoholism affects her family, making these relationships more complicated and confusing.