From the author of the beloved Cazalet Chronicles, comes a captivating tale of love, loyalty, and temptation as a seemingly happy couple’s lives are upended by the arrival of an alluring young houseguest one summer.

Anna and Edmund Cornhill lead an idyllic existence at their lovely home just outside of London. Happily married for ten years, they are content, with a healthy sex life and mutual respect for each other’s autonomy. Then, one sultry summer, Arabella drops into their lives. The Cornhills open their hearts to the “lost little rich girl” whose self-indulgent mother—once married to Edmund’s father and remarried six times—wants a holiday away from her burdensome twenty-two-year-old daughter.

Arabella proves a sweet, ingenuous, and very charming young woman, and it is not long before she has enchanted Edmund, Anne, and even Ariadne, the family cat. But what begins as a propitious arrangement unexpectedly spirals into a bewildering tangle of love, loneliness, and excruciating longing. Soon a malevolent cloud looms over the Cornhill household, threatening to decimate life as they all had known it.

With devastating insight and elegant prose, Elizabeth Jane Howard explores the hopelessly imperfect expressions of desire and of wanting to be desired in a complicated love triangle that will, ultimately, leave one of them behind.