From the Booker-Prize-winning author of Holiday. Rejacketed and reissued by Windmill to mark the 40th anniversary of Middleton's Booker Prize win.

One winter evening Alistair Murray opens his door to Eleanor Franks, a woman he has not seen for decades. A man apparently content with his life, even his retirement and bereavement have come as part of the natural order of things. But just when he thinks he must get used to the slow, lonely decline into old age, Eleanor arrives to make him call into question everything he has taken for granted.

''Middleton wrote books you remember decades on... He wrote a calm, whispering prose, full of unspoken suggestion between ordinary acts of daily living.'' Jenny Diski

''He shows us the way we age and die now, with real and graceful disstinction.'' Sunday Times