Twenty-nine year old Julia Grampion has just received her doctorate at London University, but life is looking rather dismal. Her affair with Paul has ended because of religious complications, and she drifts, entering a relationship with Bernard, learning a different and changeable idiom of love, learning how language disguises the shifting uncertainties of the human ties that bind.

Set in the academic and literary centre of 1950s London, the action occurs in university departments, the Reading Room of the British Museum, espresso bars and little Soho restaurants, the Serpentine Lido, the East End, publishers' parties, and even a “room of one’s own”, in Bloomsbury.

The characters are many and varied, including Bernard, Julia’s new lover, a sensual, cultured and selfish academic, with a learned French wife, Nicolette; Paul, charming and still in love with Julia, devoted and unwilling or unable to transgress the laws of his Church; East African student Hussein, passionate and intelligent, simple and prompt with Sanuri proverbs, like the sudden and refreshing oasis appearing in the desert of the arid London life, that reveal his love for the beautiful Georgina. A first novel of wit and intelligence, marking the arrival of the unrivalled and extraordinary talent of Christine Brooke-Rose.