What happens when an adoring young bride is met on the doorstep of her new home by her husband's former mistress? Frank, Rose and Nony are about to find out. It is 1924 and the British rule Malaya. Frank is a colonial administrator in a remote district deep in the jungle. Rose is the innocent young bride he's just brought out from England. Nony is the native mistress he'd previously abandoned, along with their four children. When Rose arrives in Malaya, she knows nothing of her new husband's past. But how long can she remain ignorant? Frank, Rose and Nony soon become entangled in vines of secrecy and lying, they are snagged by thorns of bribery and blackmail, and caught in sticky webs of bluff and counter-bluff. Something must give between them: but what?