The summer of 1968 – time of the Prague Spring, the Paris riots, student unrest and parental despair. Both sides of the generation gap believe the other has no idea of what really matters and yet, as this captivating novel shows, the fundamentals of their battles are the same: to find some kind of fulfilment. Flixe Suvarov, widowed and in debt, is battling with the first arduous steps of the political career her family and friends have planned for her. Her own tastes lie elsewhere but she does her best, fitting the uncongenial work around her other responsibilities as she fights to overcome her grief. Her four children need everything she can give them and as she watches her elder son’s passion for her beautiful, self-centred goddaughter, Amanda, Flixe longs to be able to protect him,. but there is little she can do. Amanda’s apparent confidence hides a complexity – and a vulnerability – that makes her a dangerous person to love. Flixe’s life is complicated enough even before George Mayford threatens to overturn it completely by falling in love with her. As the two women – one in her forties, the other half her age – pick their way through the maze of confusion, excitement and passion, old loves and hatreds surface until everything that once seemed certain is destroyed and a happy ending seems impossible. In this, the last novel of The Threaded Dances sequence, all the seeds that were sown by the characters in the first three bear their fruit of hatred and revenge, discovery and hope. The Tightrope Walkers is not only a moving love story set against one of the most turbulent years since the Second World War, but also a novel that will touch a chord in any mother who cannot understand her daughter and any woman who has ever hated her mother.