A summer holiday with her eccentric, infuriating family and assorted glamorous hangers-on 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 rambling Loire chateau might have its compensations.

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 . . .