Anna's parents should never have met. He was the son of down-at-heel aristocrats; she was the child of a mining family. In 1950s London, they inhabited an idealistic but brittle world of writers and journalists. Anna was born in 1960, as their marriage was falling apart. By the age of seven, both her parents were dead. Brought up by her grandparents, believing her mother had died of cancer and her father of pneumonia, it wasn't until her late twenties that Anna uncovered the disturbing truth about her parents' glittering and early lives.