When Gavanndra Hodge was seven years old her world was a precarious place. Her father was a hairdresser and drug dealer to Chelsea's most decadent inhabitants and her mother an alcoholic ex-model. It was up to Gavanndra to ensure that the cigarettes smouldering between the fingers of the aristocratic junkies passed out in her sitting room were extinguished so that she and her little sister Candy could sleep safely in their beds. But when Candy dies suddenly on holiday aged nine, Gavanndra's family, already so fragile and damaged, implodes, and a teenage Gavanndra is left to rebuild her universe, piece by piece. And she does. The life she cultivates is a long way away from the chaos of her past. She becomes a mother, and works hard to give her own children the sort of secure and ordered childhood that she never had. But there is somebody missing in the happy ending she has created for herself.
