One winter morning on an ordinary day in contemporary Dublin, an ordinary middle-class woman wakes up in her ordinary suburban home. Her husband is next to her in bed, her teenage children sleeping nearby.

Without thinking much about it, she walks out the front door and never comes back.

She travels first by car, then train, then ferry. Along the way, she finds herself in service stations and shopping centres, hotel bars and hairdressers - and in the beds of strange men.

Finally, forty-eight hours later, alone in a cottage in Wales, the woman faces up to what she has been ignoring inside herself, her family, modern society: signs of breakdown.

Breakdown is a novel about the rage and reckoning of a middle aged, educated woman who has lived her life in accordance with the expectations of society.