"Nicola is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. At a university archive dedicated to women's art, she discovers one side of a correspondence beginning in 1976 and spanning a dozen years, written from one woman--a ceramics graduate, uncannily like Nicola--to her friend, who is living a contrasting and conventionally moored life. As she reads on, an acute sense of affinity turns into obsession, and...