Anna and Edmund Cornhill have a happy marriage and a lovely home. They are content, complete, absorbed in their private idyll.

Arabella, who comes to stay one lazy summer, is rich, rootless and amoral - and, as they find out, beautiful and loving.

With her elegant prose the author traces the web of love and desire that entangles these three; but it is Arabella who finally loses out.

Elizabeth Jane Howard reveals with devastating accuracy a situation both shattering and destructive …