Along with good stepmothers, bad mothers, strange professors and wicked monks, their lives collide in a breathtaking finale. Bad, mad, flame-haired cellist Stella, adulterous Jonathan and high-spirited sisters Ellen and Lydia Dent find their fates bound together through love, loss and literature in this dazzling tragicomedy Lydia is killed in a car accident, but she returns to her bereft sister as a benign ghost who, nonetheless, comes to haunt the lives of those around her in unexpected ways: Jonathan Goldman, whose flat Lydia is running from when she is knocked down; his daughter Stella, who has discovered that her father has been having an affair with the gladiatorial Sonia; Stella’s genius painter-boy lover Izzy, whom she leaves behind as she flees to the arms of kindly Peregrine. 2009