Book excerpt: Her name is Persia: a girl of the 1970s, cherishing a nature sure in its curiosity and uncluttered values. His name is Adrian Parkes-Bourne: a man magnificent in his firm grasp on life and and his belief in modern affluence. The beginning is their meeting, and that is also an end, for Persia's life becomes singed by the relationship then bleached to suburban conformity. This is a simple story of a marriage between self certainty and self probity; a marriage where freedom of spirit is fettered and disciplined and life is seen as a continuing sequence of beginnings and ends.