A breakthrough novel of suburban loneliness and subversion--"her style, spare and singular, cuts through the decades like a scalpel" (Rachel Cooke, The Observer) A bourgeois housewife, Ruth Whiting, is "paralysed by triviality," measuring out her days in coffee mornings, glasses of sherry, and bridge parties--routines that barely disturb the solitude of her existence. Her husband spends his weeknights in town; their daughter,...