Rebounding back and forth over a fifty-year period, this book is best described as a Margaret Drabble novel of everyday life splintered into a Dr. Who season-long arc. The arrangement is incredibly ambitious, and manages to maintain a complicated set of plots in a way that is mostly successful, often disturbing in its violent detail, yet also occasionally dull. Although the overall effect of this historical novel is uneven, I found that many of the individual events and twists stay vividly in my mind.