This is Durrell's first novel, published in 1935, shortly after he left England to live abroad until his death in 1990. It traces Walsh Clifton's Anglo-Indian childhood and his struggles to negotiate a life between "mother" India and "father" England. The trauma of leaving India for an alien home propels the novel's concerns with colonial life and its wounds, transitioning from an idyllic rural world to London and Bloomsbury in the 1920s.