Marooned in a sprawling farmhouse in Norfolk, teenage Linda Radlett feels herself destined for greater things. She longs for love, but how will she ever find it? She can't even get a signal on her mobile phone. Linda's strict, former rock star father terrifies any potential suitors away, while her bohemian mother, wafting around in silver jewellery, answers Linda's urgent questions about love with upsettingly vivid allusions to animal husbandry.

Eventually Linda does find her way out from the bosom of her deeply eccentric extended family, and moves to London to become a model. She knows she doesn't want to marry 'a man who looks like a pudding', as her good and dull sister Louisa has done, and marries the flashy, handsome son of a UKIP peer instead. But her new life is unromantic: darker, wilder and more complicated than she expected.

Then one day, at her lowest ebb, Linda spontaneously boards the Eurostar to Paris. There she is swept up in a feverish love affair that will upend her life completely.