The story is told in two voices, mother and daughter. It begins in France where young Lou is introduced to the rich neighbours of her best friend. When Lou's father dies they make her their ward and later arrange fro her to marry their son. Lou moves to England and is reunited with her mother, now remaried. Lou has a problem with confined spaces due to something that happened in her husband's family château ...
The symbiotic pattern of evolution is everywhere and allows us a very different and fascinating window into the way symbiotic viruses work, since all viruses are symbiotic, including those involved in our human reproduction.
Where do viruses, such as Ebola and HIV, come from and why they are so aggressive? This book changed tenets of evolutionary virology, developing the concepts of aggressive symbiosis and plague culling, which explain much of the horror of plague virus
