Alhambra lists "the uses of mystery" among her gifts; she also lives for the movies. An encyclopedic knowledge of light, speed and celluloid allows her to recast herself as a series of highlights: "My father was Terence and my mother was Julie (Stamp.
Christie). I was born and bred by the hills (alive) and the animals (talked to). I considered myself well in, part of the furniture. There wasn't a lot to spare. Who cared? I put on a show, right here in the barn".
The novel's larger, less fragmentary, inner plot revolves around the Smart family.
Eve Smart writes popular microhistory, books which take "the ordinary life of a living person who died before his or her time" and reconstruct an "alternative aftermath -the story of how things could have been". These "auto- biotrufictinterviews" have sold well, but she has stalled on her latest and hopes that renting a house in a "quintessential" English village will help. Eve is joined in Norfolk by her university-lecturer husband, Michael, and her two children, Magnus and Astrid. All seem disconnected from each other. Michael is gearing up for a summer of love with one of his students, Philippa Knott ("Good dress sense, almost totally straight-A in her accumulative writtens for continual assessment"), and Magnus refuses to leave his bedroom. This is more than adolescent torpor. He has been involved, unintentionally, in a schoolmate's suicide, having shown two boys how to attach a girl's photograph to a pornographic image. "The end. He showed them what to do. They did it. They put her head on another body. They sent it round the email list. She killed herself." Astrid, the youngest member of the family, seems oblivious to the dysfunction surrounding her and tries to occupy herself in the "substandard" rented house by "taping dawns":
She now has nine dawns one after the other on the mini dv tape in her Sony digital . . . . But it is hard to know what moment exactly dawn is . . . . do beginnings just keep stretching on forwards and forwards all day? Or maybe it is back and back they stretch.
There have been children before in Smith's work but this is the first child character that has been so fully realized. She is depicted with a combination of comedy and tenderness:
Nobody knows she is awake. Nobody is any the wiser. Any the wiser sounds like a character from ancient history. Astrid in the year 1003 bc (Before Celebrity) goes to the woods where Any the Wiser lives . . . . I brought an offering, Astrid calls into the dark of the cave. She has brought an offering of croissants.
Astrid experiences a different sort of dawning when a strange young woman called Amber arrives, establishes herself as a house-guest, and sets about simultaneously entrancing and disrupting the Smart family. She takes Astrid on missions to baffle supermarket closed-circuit television systems, throws the Sony digital camera off a motorway bridge, sleeps with Magnus in the local church and reads Michael and Eve's minds. Amber appears to have come from nowhere (though her name echoes back to the mysterious frame narrator), but she tells Eve that her presence is accidental. Formerly "in investment assurance and insurance interests", she says she took up a nomadic existence when "a child, a girl of seven wearing a little winter hood edged in fur, stepped between two cars on to the road in front of her and the . . . car hit the child and the child died".
