Description

A haunting portrayal of love and betrayal in a London hollowed by war.

It is wartime London, and the carelessness of people with no future flows through the evening air. Stella discovers that her lover Robert is suspected of selling information to the enemy. Harrison, the British intelligence agent on his trail, wants to bargain, the price for his silence being Stella herself. Caught between two men and unsure who she can trust, the flimsy structures of Stella’s life begin to crumble.

‘Alive with the erotic tensions of the blackout, the Blitz and the heightened pleasures of sex in the proximity of death’ London Review of Books

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROY FOSTER

This series of war novels from Vintage Classics presents eight powerful stories about the horror and waste of war – each a passionate plea to prevent its repetition

Publisher Review

Both of its time and timeless, a spy tale and a haunting love story… She is the supreme mid-century anatomist of the heart, with a unique sensitivity to the lives of ordinary English men and women in extremis * Guardian * [Bowen] put into it her experience of the feverish, jagged life of those who stayed on in London throughout the air raids – of broken glass underfoot and grit in the air, of a single precarious match struck in the blackout, exhilaration at staying alive * Times Literary Supplement * Her novels and essays are alive with the erotic tensions of the blackout, the Blitz and the heightened pleasures of sex in the proximity of death. Preternaturally sensitive to colour, light and detail, she caught the nuances of the unnameable new sensations Londoners experienced * London Review of Books *