"This pitch-perfect novel, an inquiry into romanticism and disaffection, is witty, unexpectedly moving and a revelation again of Brophy's originality. Entirely of its time, it remains ahead of itself even now . in its emotional range and its intellectual and formal blend of stoicism and sophistication." --Ali Smith "One of the strangest and wittiest British writers of the past half century . A comet in her day." --Terry Castle "Brigid Brophy [was] one of the most original and engaging writers and critics of the last century, and it is an enormous pleasure to discover this early novel, first published in 1956 . Brophy writes with great wit about the uncertainty of youth. It's sharp, funny and clever, and as fresh as new paint.

" -- The Times "There is nobody quite like her, no one who sees the world quite in her original way." --A.S. Byatt, The Times Literary Supplement "Part of Brophy's brilliance is that the queerness doesn't seem suppressed or coded; instead, it seems to be so much part of the way things are that it hardly needs separate mention. She embeds her schoolgirl romance in a quixotic quest narrative, an existential search for the unrecoverable . Her style [is a] revelation . Her metaphors are persistently strange and wondrous . She should be read with her more famous contemporaries such as Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch for the breadth and incisiveness of her intellect, but she should also be read with sui generis stylists such as Henry Green and Kay Boyle.

" --Stacey D'Erasmo, from the Foreword.