They were meeting to be reconciled after fifteen years. This present mood in which they sat relaxed was nothing more than the relief of two people coming back to a bombed building once familiar . . .

Two sisters, Madeleine and Dinah, have made a wary truce after years of estrangement. For over a decade, bohemian, sensual Dinah has been conducting a clandestine affair with her sister's husband, Rickie; while conventional, resolute Madeleine has accepted that her marriage has been of limited success. Now Rickie's sudden death has made widows of both sisters - leaving them to come to terms with the shattered fragments of their own relationship.

This heartbreaking novel explores with extraordinary insight the rivalry, the beauty and the pain of love.

'[She has] an extraordinary gift for description, for evoking the tones and textures of the material world; an exceptionally sophisticated approach to structure . . . and, above all, an astonishing, unembarrassed emotionality' JONATHAN COE

'Lehmann has always written brilliantly of women in love' MARGARET DRABBLE