Gut-wrenching, ingenious, absolutely hilarious, this is the rediscovered story of woman's desperate quest for freedom.

'I'm thirty, and I'm stuck'

Arabella is on an increasingly desperate quest for freedom from her overbearing father and her conspicuously absent brother. But her desire for self-actualisation only ends up leading her into the orbit of a happily married man. A spiky, self-conscious love affair begins, complete with awful dinner dates, devastating kisses and agonising introspection. Can Arabella realise what she wants? Can she escape the trap of being sexy, good and likable?

Back in print after many decades, this is an outstanding novel by an extraordinary and little-known writer, the inimitable Rosemary Tonks.

'Salted with wit and peppered with clever images' Guardian

‘At their best, the novels are feats of Tonks’s earlier personality, shining and acrid in its ‘fierce hot-blooded sulkiness’… the glittering triumph of an unscathable ego’ London Review of Books

‘Writing like this…is far too beautiful and accomplished to be kept off the shelf. It catches like nothing else the smogs, the rodentine genes, the murky post-War grays, the lurking sexual violence of London’ Michael Hoffman, Poetry Foundation

"Her writing captured the pungent, punchy essence of that city in the Swinging Sixties" - Paris Review

"Nobody writes about angsty women like Tonks" - The Millions

"The Tonks character is always trapped. As proud as Lucifer, and trapped. She may be on holiday in Italy with friends, or laid up with gout, she can as little escape as a character in a play can escape the footlights and the stage" - Poetry Foundation

"Tonks was principled and ambitious about her writing, pushing a continental decadence into the oddly shaped crannies of bleak British humor" - New Yorker