Shortlisted for the Booker Prize,[1] it tells the story of Sheila Redden, a doctor's wife from Belfast, who takes an American lover eleven years her junior while in Paris.

But in telling explicitly of the ardor and the loyalties which rend the doctor’s wife, he will doubtless divide women readers who crave romance from feminists who don’t.

"[4] According to eNotes, "Moore dramatizes Sheila’s psychological crisis in spiritual terms: She has attained a state of grace during the Villefranche episode, but, according to her Catholic outlook, she must enter purgatory to expiate her venial sins.

"[5] Kirkus Reviews said, however, that in "refusing to go to America with Tom, abandoning her husband and youngster – [Sheila Redden] summarily turns her back on all that was, isolating herself in a smaller void.

But somehow the unarticulated decision of this once sensible, now vagrant woman, lacks conviction particularly since all the other externals belong to the glossier knowns of women's fiction--comparable to Mary Dunne's.