Beyond Darkness completes a trilogy tracing the blossoming of a woman's identity and sexuality from childhood to middle age. Set in the 1980's, it is the story of a mature woman who has just left her husband after thirty years of marriage. She has become a member of a Rajneesh commune in Sydney, Australia, and travels to the United States for a year where she comes to embrace independence and to accept her sexuality as natural instead of her previous feelings of shame and guilt. Her story is interleaved with the lives of her extended family and their attitudes towards her new outlook on life.