In the deserted rooms above Hewitt's Shoe Repairs and Fittings, seventy-two-year-old Winifred Foy has sought refuge. Abandoned time and again throughout her life, Winnie lives in a delicate world of exile and isolation, until she is robbed of her only material possessions: a suitcase and a wig. On a journey to find the thief, Winnie enters her unbound world and pieces together the fragments of her life, from her childhood in the 1930s, to the dislocation caused by the Second World War, to the memory of her first love. Winnie's once secluded world beings to fill with people, and with ghosts, including her devoted but quixotic father, the haunting figure of her mother, her domineering grandfather and her spinster aunt. Time and memory are eerily fluid, and Winnie is forced to confront the layered shadows of her former self.

TREZZA AZZOPARDI is the critically acclaimed author of The Hiding Place, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and longlisted for the Orange Prize and the Guardian First Book Award, and Remember Me, which was shortlisted for the Welsh Book of the Year. Born in Cardiff, Wales, she is a graduate of the Creative Writing School at the University of East Anglia. She lives in Norfolk, England.

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