Irene is clever, ambitious, easily seduced, and tempted by everything-everything beyond the confines of her life on a remote Australian farm and her marriage to a man she might once, briefly, have loved. Rex, her quiet, adoring, responsible husband, bears mostly silent witness as Irene wrestles with her duties as wife and mother, tends her garden, and imaginatively resists her fate, and as their marriage unravels-inexorably, bitterly, spectacularly.