Following on from her book of twins and sisters, the author now turns to grandmothers, describing the tentative beginnings of her own relationship to two small granddaughters, in a family where she is the first grandmother to survive in four generations. In a mass of material gathered from literature, science, history, biography and anthropology, she looks for the role models - and awful warnings - missing from her own experience, and attempts to define and redefine the role of grandmotherhood in an age when fewer and fewer women fit the traditional model of sweet old grey-haired gran - if they ever did. Penelope Farmer shows grandmothers, good, bad, old, young, happy, and sometimes wretched, as seen by themselves and by their grandchildren, in all eras and from all parts of the world. In the words of one authority she quotes, "What everyone needs in the millennium, is access to the internet - and a grandmother".