The protagonists are Neil Langton and Ellen Shorland, both of whom have tragic pasts and both of whom are staying at a boarding house in Cornwall.

Neil is in the process of obtaining a divorce from an adulterous wife, whilst mourning the death of his young daughter, and Ellen is mourning the loss of her first love Jock, who died in World War II, believing herself incapable of loving again.

[1] From the Introduction by Sarah Dunant (2014) in the Virago Modern Classics edition: In her fifth novel North Face (1949) nursing becomes character rather than plot.

Inside a love story between two guests in a Yorkshire [sic] boarding house after the war, Renault uses two women in their thirties as a kind of sparring Greek chorus, ruminating on the morality (or not) of the affair.

Though the satire is at the expense of them both (at times they are more entertaining than the rather laboured love story), the nurse at least feels in touch with life.