A Fairly Honourable Defeat

The most important novelist writing in my time
A. S. Byatt

Hilda Foster is alone in an isolated cottage when she receives an important telephone call. She must get in touch with her husband but it is virtually impossible. How can she avert the crisis?

Hilda’s troubles began when she trusts a slippery intellectual called Julius King who decides to demonstrate how he can persuade easily loving couples, caring friends, and devoted siblings to betray their loyalties to one another. Melodramatic incidents, purloined letters, apparently unmotivated actions abound as this dark comedy of errors unfolds.