Serena Frome recalls how she was “sent on a secret mission for the British security service” (7) 40 years ago. Serena grows up in a small English city. Serena’s natural flair for mathematics is encouraged by her mother, a hard-working, self-sacrificing woman who works hard to help her husband rise to the rank of bishop in the Church of England and who hides a secret feminist streak. Her childhood is uneventful but her freakish talent for mathematics means that she studies the subject at university, even though she would rather study literature. As a result, Serena is accepted into the prestigious Cambridge University to study mathematics, a feat almost unheard of in the late 1960s.

At university, Serena struggles and barely graduates. She indulges her love of literature by reading voraciously as an escape from her dull studies. Serena shares her love of books by writing a column in a student magazine, but her developing love of Russian literature means that she begins to take herself too seriously and her initial fame and popularity begin to fade. At the same time, her sudden and ill-informed opposition to the communist regimes depicted in these novels makes her even less popular and she loses her column.