Rosemary Summers is an amateur taxidermist and a passionate collector of tattoos. To her, both activities honour the deceased and keep their memory alive. After the death of her beloved grandfather, and while struggling to finish her thesis on gothic Victorian novels, she returns alone to Magpie Hall to claim her inheritance: Grandpa's own taxidermy collection, started more than 100 years ago by their ancestor Henry Summers. As she sorts through Henry's legacy, the ghosts of her family's past begin to make their presence known.

Laden with wit, irony and Jolley's perceptive musings on the ties that bind us, this comedy of manners tells the story of an eccentric professor and the seven women in his life.

From one of New Zealand's most successful writers comes a story of Boomtown Los Angeles, 1929: the movies have burst into song and speech, and aircraft into the skies at speed. Into this world of soundstages and speakeasies comes Xas, stunt flier and wingless angel, with his German passport and his broken heart, determined only to go on living in the air. What does it take to turn a wind? Will it be Conrad Cole, movie director and aircraft designer, a glory-seeking king of the grand splash who is also a man sinking into his own sovereign darkness. Or will it be Flora McLeod, film editor and maimed former actress, who sees something in Xas that no-one has ever seen before, not even God, who made him, or Lucifer, the general he once followed - Lucifer, who has lost him once but won't let that be the end of it. What does it take to turn a wind? Mountains. Or another wind.