The New Star

Lydia Marsden is just another bored, frustrated upper-class wife in 1940s rural England who wishes her husband would make love to her occasionally. And then three visitors call on her husband. Foreigners. One of whom is green and has an unusual number of fingers. And all of whom seem singularly unaccustomed to the rules governing polite society. To the extent that their leader is a woman. And everything changes (if only because the housemaid was mysteriously disintegrated by some kind of ray). Lydia discovers the joys of sapphism. Her friend Clarissa experiments with xenophilia. And rural England will never be the same again.

This is a not-so-gentle satire on the English County culture chronicled by Angela Thirkell and the like, asking why should women have to live with a world in which the only options available to them were frustrated wife or servant? Why does it matter what the neighbours think? And what happens if you set a man with a cosh up against a man with a ray gun?