Beyond the glass casing I was in, was the weather, were the winter streets . It was always indoors or in taxis or in his warm car; it was mostly in the safe dark, or in half-light in the deepest corner of the restaurant, as out of sight as possible. Olivia Curtis, living on the fringes of bohemian London society, is approaching her late twenties with a failed marriage behind her. On the train down to visit her parents, she meets by chance the man who enchanted her as a dreamy, awkward seventeen-year-old: Rollo Spencer, charming, handsome and married. Falling hopelessly in love, Olivia is drawn into a world of secret meetings, snatched phone calls and all-too-brief liaisons in anonymous hotel rooms - knowing all the while that heartbreak is inevitable. Years ahead of its time, this subtle and powerful novel shocked readers with its searing honesty and passionate portrayal of an illicit affair. 'First published in 1936, this was years ahead of its time . Passionate and brutally honest in its portrayal of how love can overwhelm your life' ESTHER FREUD 'A truly great book.

It is beautifully written, shrewdly observed and deftly crafted, but the novel's real concern is what it means for a woman to life an authentic life' ELIZABETH DAY '[Olivia's] ability to understand, but not to prevent, the failure of her love affair, her loneliness, her insecurity, her sensitivity to every slight change in the emotional temperature, all of this Lehmann rendered faultlessly' London Review of Books.