Meredith Moore is the perfect continuity girl. An on-set film script supervisor, it is her job to make sure every frame of the pictures is consistent with the one before. She is the error catcher. The needle-in-the-haystack finder. A cigarette in the left hand when it should be in the right, a prematurely melted ice cube in a half-empty glass of Scotch, a stray lock of an actor's hair -- these are the details by which she measures out her life.

But when Meredith wakes up on the morning of her 35th birthday yearning for a baby, her personal sense of continuity is thrown into flux. Determined not to marry, she impulsively flles to London to reunite with her eccentric mother and accept a new job on a well-known producer's film set. Her covert plan: to become a sperm bandit and find an unsuspecting donor to father her child.

Navigating London's murky social waters, Meredith is thrown into a strange new story, one that quickly spins out of control. In her quest to get pregnant on her own terms, she will accidentally uncover a web of secrets that will change the way she envisions both her working life and the nature of love.

Leah Mclaren is best known for her popular weekly column in The Globe and mail's Style section. In 2002 she acted as the paper's London arts correspondent. Her writing has been published in The Times, The London Evening Standard, The Sunday Telegrah and The Spectator magazine. She now divides her time between Toronto and her farm in Grafton, Ontario. This is her first novel.