Anna knows that if you want something really badly, you have to plan it. After all, shes a chef. To make a béchamel sauce, you need the right ingredients in the right quantities, at the right time. So when she gets pregnant, she plans a perfect new life in Provence for her perfect new baby.

But when their daughter Freya is born with profound mental and physical disabilities and Tobias decides that he can't love his child, Anna is determined to persuade her husband that keeping Freya and moving to France is still the life they've always wanted.

The family ends up in a vermin-infested farmhouse in the Languedoc where they become a magnet for a cast of eccentrics. With their rickety home falling down around them, and Freya's hospital visits becoming frighteningly frequent, Anna draws on reserves of strength she never knew she had to get her life back on track and keep her family together.