For twenty years, Father Ewan McEwan, a Roman Catholic priest, has enjoyed a passionate long-term relationship with Lady Marina Proudfoot, an older woman of great beauty and refinement, whose two-year-old daughter and husband were tragically drowned in a boating accident. But when Marina unexpectedly dies, the emotional fallout affects not just Ewan, but Marina's son, Timothy, his lover, Roger, and Roger's wife, Sally. Now Ewan must survive not only his profound grief but also the secret revelations she leaves behind.

Who Was Angela Zendalic? is set in Oxford, in the locality of Jericho and the world of University academia, encompassing the past and the present. A deeply moving and sensitive story told with skill, humour, and a mirror to profoundly changing times. In 1954, Peggy, a respectable war widow and librarian, gives birth out of wedlock to Angela, a 'coloured' baby, and due to the discrimination of society, and her own deep shame, must give up the baby for adoption. Angela is adopted by a loving and well-meaning white couple, and as she grows up must come to terms with racial prejudice, the confusion surrounding her circumstances, and of falling in love with a man fifteen years her senior. Sarah, Angela's own daughter, grows up to be a feisty, liberated single parent who, on the death of her father, discovers her mother was a stranger called Angela Zendalic. Thus, she must confront her shock in order to search for her.