A marriage is put to the test in this astonishing exploration of love from the author of the Cazalet Chronicles.

Anna and Edmund Cornhill have a happy marriage and a lovely home. They are content, complete, absorbed in their private idyll. Arabella, who comes to stay one lazy summer, is rich, rootless and amoral - and, as they find out, beautiful and loving. A web of love and desire entangles these three; but in such a treacherous game, someone must finally lose out. Elizabeth Jane Howard reveals with elegant prose and devastating accuracy a situation both shattering and destructive . . . Praise for Elizabeth Jane Howard 'She is one of those novelists who shows, through her work, what the novel is for . . . She helps us to do the necessary thing - open our eyes and our hearts' Hilary Mantel 'Her navigation of the web of human relations [is] seemingly effortless' Sunday Telegraph

From the lauded, bestselling author of the Cazalet Chronicles, in Odd Girl Out, Elizabeth Jane Howard reveals with devastating accuracy a marriage put in a most destructive situation.

Anna and Edmund Cornhill have a happy marriage and a lovely home. They are content, complete, absorbed in their private idyll.

Arabella, who comes to stay one lazy summer, is rich, rootless and amoral – and, as they find out, beautiful and loving.

In her elegant prose, Howard traces the web of love and desire that entangles these three and will, ultimately, leave one of them behind.

'Her talent seemed so effervescent, so unstoppable, that there was no predicting where it might take her' – Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall