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

David and Alison are a successful young couple planning their wedding, but they are surrounded by family and friends whose marriages have ended in failure. As each member of this close community struggles to make or re-make a life, Stanley Middleton tests the reality of present and past marriage, its possibilities and dangers, its hopes and fears.

''His reputation, built book by book, as an astute observer of middle-England bourgeois life and as a writer whose reach extends far beyond his immediate milieu, is probably now invulnerable.'' Nicholas Wroe.'' Times Literary Supplement

''Every page is taut with inner strength and truth.'' Mail on Sunday