Candida Wilton-a woman recently betrayed, rejected, divorced, and alienated from her three grown daughters-moves from a beautiful Georgian house in lovely Suffolk to a two-room walk-up flat in a run-down building in central London. Candida is not exactly destitute. So is the move perversity, she wonders, a survival test, or is she punishing herself? How will she adjust to this shabby, menacing, but curiously appealing city? What can happen, at her age, to change her life? And yet, as she climbs the dingy communal staircase with her suitcases, she feels both nervous and exhilarated.

There is a relationship with a computer to which she now confides her past and her present. And friendships of sorts with other women - widows, divorced, never married, women straddled between generations. And then Candida's surprise inheritance...

A beautifully rendered story, this is Margaret Drabble at her novelistic best.

"One of the more absorbing novels I have read in a long time, both for its sheer storytelling ability and for its powers of imaginative conjecture." --The New York Times Book Review

"This book fairly bounces. Its zest dervies in large part from the perfectly sustained tone, which expresses humor without poking fun, and deep regret without sentimentality." --The Atlantic Monthly

"The realistic novel, Drabble forcefully demonstrates, retains its ability to comment powerfully on our lives and engage our emotions deeply." --The Washington Post Book World