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

A brother and sister – Bernard is at college, Mary is still at school - are struggling with their own young lives and loves, near the end of one beautiful summer. At the same time, their mother Ivy is dying from cancer whilst their father, a simple and dignified man, is barely coping. A family faces fundamental changes, together and apart.

'This humane book digs patiently beneath the surface of ordinary lives to the rock of universal truths.' Sunday Times

'Stanley Middleton, once dubbed 'The Chekhov of suburbia', is to the Midlands suburb what Anne Tyler is to the Midwest picket fence. His careful writing creates an always precise and often unnerving picture of reality.' The Times