Olive Wellwood, a famous writer, writes for each of her children a separate private book, bound in different colours and placed on a shelf. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh the children play in a story-book world, but their lives, and those of their rich cousins, children of a city stockbroker, and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. 2009.