An experiment in love

'The most powerful of her novels, a near-faultless masterpiece of pathos, observation and feeling ...She writes like an angel. ' Sunday TelegraphIt was the year after Chappaquiddick, and all spring Carmel had watery dreams about the disaster.

Now she, Karina and Julianne were escaping the dreary north for a London University hall of residence.

Awaiting them was a winter of new preoccupations -- sex, politics, food and fertility -- and a pointless grotesque tragedy of their own.