Vera has cabin fever. Confined with her thoughts in the concrete tower of a New York hotel, she is haunted by her mother's reminders of what she should have been, and the desperate choices she faced as an unprotected single mother. Elizabeth Jolley writes lucidly of betrayal and survival, loneliness and desire, and with compassion for the sad dislocations of love between parents and children. In Cabin Fever she again beguiles with her particular blend of humour and the serious, and a splendid array of characters.