Odd girl out.
The award-winning author of the Cazalet Chronicles "brilliantly" examines a marriage disrupted by a beautiful interloper ( The New York Times). Anne and Edmund Cornhill are the perfect couple. From their steadfast marriage to their beautiful home in the suburbs of London to their imperious yet charming cat, they paint a picture of stability to be emulated and admired—until Arabella Dawick appears in their lives. Beautiful, wealthy, and shiftless, twenty-two-year-old Arabella has spent her short years lavishing in luxury and loneliness, craving the kind of connection the Cornhills share. She comes to them wanting nothing more than their affection. But as the emotional and sexual ties between each of them grow and change, the once-idyllic home becomes a domestic minefield of desires and secrets, forever changing the dynamic between man and wife. With brutal honesty and stunning prose, the highly acclaimed author of The Sea Change and Getting It Right delves into the meaning of love, sex, and satisfaction, in a story that is at once startlingly unique and unsettlingly familiar.