It's the decadent 1920s, and the Anna, the daughter of rich mill owner runs away from home following years of suppression, belittling and emotional abuse by her father and older brother. Anna does not realize what a rich, entitled girl she was until she finds herself living in a horrid rooming house and trying to support herself in London. It is only by lucky happenstance and Anna's quick thinking that she finds herself with any kind of a job at all, even if it is as a dancer in a night club.

The novel starts out with great promise. Anna seems to be a strong willed young woman who takes risks in order to assert her independence and live life on her own terms, despite not being recognized as a person by law, but a piece of property owned by her father. Sadly, for both Anna and the reader, she makes some bad life style choices and ends up as a party girl, indulging in illegal drugs and in love with a spineless mama's boy who far out classes her, and inevitably uses and discards her.

Rees has done an excellent job of researching the 1920s -- the class system, parties that go until dawn, the secrecy and punishment of homosexuals, the predetermined course for women, the lot of factory workers, even the transportation system. Unfortunately we just don't care what happens to her insensitive characters.