Up in the dusty attic of Prairie Bluff Homestead, Anne-Marie keeps all of her beloved books locked safely away. For her treasured novels - and the tragic heroines who make them so irresistible - have a way of hitting too close to home. To the Homestead itself, actually...

This otherwise ordinary boarding house has become the favoured refuge of the great women of literature, who descend on Anne-Marie and her daughter Penny - at all hours, and in all manner of distress - as their storylines are unravelling. And the last thing Anne-Marie needs is an emotional Anna Karenina accidentally discovering she is bound to take her own life on the railway tracks.

The Homestead has played host to a heartbroken Emma Bovary, a distraught Scarlett O'Hara, a weeping Catherine Earnshaw - but this extraordinary literary education will teach Penny as much about herself, her mother and their destinies as it does about the heroines...