When her daughter, Grace, leaves for a gap year in Paris, Isobel is consumed with regret for her own lost dreams and mourns her pre-motherhood self. Frustration grows into bitterness against her husband, Robert; the bookshop in Rye from which they derive their precarious income; the decline of her ageing parents, and the feeling that life has passed her by. When she meets George – suave and handsome father to Grace’s American friend, Nina – a flicker of her old self is re-ignited. Then one snowy morning, she slips on the ice, setting off a chain of events that will forever change her life. The Gap Year of the title refers as much to Isobel’s ‘year out’ as Grace’s.

Eighteen year-old, Grace, is on a parallel rite of passage, attending language classes and living with the elegant octogenarian, Madame Chirol, widow of a famous French Resistance fighter. At its heart, Gap Year is a story of mothers and daughters: Isobel and Grace; Isobel and her own mother, Pam; Nina and her dead mother, Mellany.