The sixteen years of Janet's life begin on a fogbound winter night in wartime Edinburgh. Her father, home on leave, peering into the blue wicker basket, comments, "It's about the size of a cat." Later, as sibling after sibling appears, Janet finds herself slipping further and further toward the periphery of family life. Brought up in the unrelenting chill of Calvinism and the Scottish climate, she turns from people to animals, to literature, and to her own fertile imagination. Written with lyricism, poignance, and great unexpected flashes of humor, the novel traces the chain of events that, in the dour setting of Scotland in the 1940s and 50s, cause the bizzare death of a young girl. People, birds, and beasts move in a gleeful danse macabre through a lowering landscape in a tale as rich in atmosphere as it is witty and mordant.