Description

‘Bewitching’ The Times
‘Flawless’ Observer

‘Once a thing is known it can never be unknown’

By day Frances Hinton works in a medical library, passing the time by studying her colleagues and taking notes for the novel she might write one day. Each night she returns to a vast mansion flat, which has felt bigger and emptier since her mother’s recent death.

Then Frances meets charming Nick and his dazzling wife Alix, and finds herself drawn into their tight circle of friends, her diary suddenly full of engagements and excitement. So taken is Frances with her glittering new life that she doesn’t consider that the couple could discard her just as quickly as they picked her up, or that just one act in defiance of Alix’s wishes might see her lose everything. Until, of course, it is too late…

‘How can anything be so funny and so sad both at once? Every sentence is an object lesson in compression and wit’ Tessa Hadley, Guardian

‘No one writes with more skill and honesty about the human condition’ Observer

‘Each book is a prayer bead on a string, and each prayer is a secular, circumspect prayer, a prayer and a protest and a charm against encroaching night’ Hilary Mantel, praise for Anita Brookner

Publisher Review

Witty, intelligent and tirelessly perceptive. * Evening Standard * Flawless. * Observer, Books of the Year * Clever and engrossing. * David Lodge, Sunday Times * Bewitching. * The Times * How can anything be so funny and so sad both at once? Every sentence is an object lesson in compression and wit. -- Tessa Hadley on 'A Start in Life' * Guardian Summer Reads, 2015 *