A successful archaeologist with four healthy children, she is divorced and famous. Above all, she is independent. So what is she searching for on her trips into the distant past of the desert and into the nearer past of her family?

          The Realms of Gold is a sophisticated, realistically suspenseful love story about two highly intelligent, successful, complicated people who love, who separate, and who need to return to each other. And it is a novel, as well, about family connection and human heritage in the last twentieth century – how, in the midst of the endless splitting and drifting apart, people yearn to regain their links with family, past and present, and the strengthening revelations of self those links can yield.

          Frances Wingate is a famous archeologist. Divorced, the mother of four, she is a career woman possessed of a splendid carelessness – able to manage conferences in Rome and Africa, "digs" in far corners of the world, breakthrough papers in her field. Reeling from country to country, organizing meals and schools and comfort for the kids, buying socks for one in Alexandria, rushing home from Glasgow to take another to the doctor, wearing clothes until they fall to pieces, she is unruffled by it all – full of passion, amusement, and appeal, still madly in love with the married man she has been seeing on and off (now off) for years. Madly in love – but wistful and hopeful, not desperate.