The novel is set in England, with a time-frame divided between the inter-war years and the peace after 1945, and is focused on the characters of Harriet Claridge and Vesey Macmillan, childhood acquaintances whose missed connection haunts them over decades.

With Vesey gone and the summer over, Harriet manages to get a job working as an assistant in a clothing shop and begins to date Charles Jephcott, her much older next door neighbour who had previously been jilted at the altar and is reluctant to recommit to another woman.

Vesey is now a mediocre actor in an unremarkable theatre troupe while Harriet is a middle-class housewife, married to Charles, and mother to a teenage girl named Betsy.

"[1] In reviewing the 2009 reissue, Elizabeth Day of the Guardian wrote "Taylor's forte as an author is acute observation and the devastating precision of her understated prose.

Her brilliance is particularly evident in this, her fifth novel, set in her familiar milieu of middle-class married couples whose unfulfilled lives are crisscrossed with unspoken tension and stifled ardour."

She further observed it "showcases much of what makes Taylor a great novelist: piercing insight, a keen wit and a genuine sense of feeling for her characters.

"[2] Writing for The New Republic, Britt Peterson wrote "The ambiguous ending, Taylor’s best, like a perfect bubble that never bursts, is a moving refusal to render final judgment on any of the imperfect, well-meaning bumblers who make up the story.