Publisher's Synopsis
"Exquisitely readable: funny, moving, and altogether a delight" FINANCIAL TIMES The young Luke Ribbons, a vicar's son and lately a guest of Her Majesty, arrives in the rackety Slattery household as a lodger, and falls irrevocably in love with redoubtable and beautiful Pearl, mother of four and grandmother. Pearl, unbalanced between respectability and ruin, is unwilling to distinguish him from the throng of dispossessed youth trooping through her household. Luke enlists the service of a local provincial witch doctor, but things don't go quite as he had planned...
