Twenty-nine year old Julia Grampion has just received her doctorate at London University, but life is looking rather dismal. Her affair with Paul has ended, and she drifts to a relationship with Bernard, learning a different and changeable idiom of love, learning how language disguises the shifting uncertainties of the human ties that bind.
The story is set in a cosmopolitan 1950s London featuring university departments, the Reading Room of the British Museum, espresso bars and little Soho restaurants, publishers' parties, and a Bloomsbury "room of one's own".
The characters are many and varied, including Bernard, Julia's new lover, a sensual, cultured, and selfish academic, with a learned French wife, Nicolette; Paul, charming and still in love with Julia, devoted and unwilling or unable to transgress the laws of his Church; East African student Hussein, passionate and intelligent, simple and prompt with Sanuri proverbs, like a sudden and refreshing oasis appearing in the desert of the arid London life, that express his love for the beautiful Georgina. A first novel of drollery and intelligence, marking the arrival of the unrivalled and extraordinary talent of Christine Brooke-Rose.
"She is a scholar and a wit and her first novel is delightful. She turns pedantry into a fool's bladder."-JOHN DAVENPORT, The Observer
"Miss Brooke-Rose is a new novelist worth watching."-Evening Standard
"Among women novelists of the post-war generation, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Jane Howard and Christine Brooke-Rose make a formidable trio."-Church Times
"She takes a splendid swipe at her go-getting cultural profiteers . . . she has also drawn a most devastating picture of cosy spiritual smugness among the elite."-PETER GREEN, Daily Telegraph