A summer holiday with her eccentric, infuriating family is the last thing Tash French would usually volunteer for. But her mother is insistent and, out of a job and recently ditched by her boyfriend, Tash decides that spending July in the vast and rambling chateau in the Loire might have its compensations. Gawky, shy, funny, intensely bright and talented but completely lacking in self-confidence, Tash finds herself reduced to a quivering jelly in the company of her fashion model sister and assorted glamorous hangers-on. The arrival of dishy event rider Hugo Beauchamp, object of Tash's teenage fantasies, only makes her insecurity worse; craggy actor Niall O'Shaughnessy sets a further cat among the pigeons. It's a summer of lust, bed-hopping, unresolved sexual tension, horses, dogs, bolshy kids - and lots of bad behaviour. And in the midst of bedlam, at least two people fall in love...