The novel centers on the story of a few summer months in 1998 in Stratford, Ontario against the backdrop of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. The novel is narrated in third-person narrator, which allows change of perspective between the chapters, with Jane Kincaid (a property maker for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival) being the dominant character voice throughout. Jane Kincaid is an immigrant from a southern town somewhere in Louisiana, called Plantation. She left the United States for Ontario to begin a new life as an artist, and to escape her family who was providing her with a modest income from an inheritance. Jane shed her birth-name Aura Lee Terry during the move. She met her husband Griffin, an up-and-coming young Shakespearean actor, and the two lead what seems an entirely ordinary happy suburban existence together with their seven-year-old son Will, dog Rudyard and housekeeper/nanny Mercy Bowman.