In this bestselling classic novel which became a famous film, Jane Graham, alone and pregnant, retreats to a dingy attic bedsit in Fulham where she finds unexpected companionship, happiness and love. Set in the late 1950s, the 27 year-old unmarried Jane Graham arrives alone at a run-down boarding house in London after being turned out of her comfortable middle class home by her shocked father who has learned she is pregnant. Jane narrates the story as we follow her through her pregnancy and her encounters with the other misfits and outsiders who reside at the boarding house.

Jane has had her baby and is living along with him in a country cottage. Her idyllic time there is soon complicated by the arrival of Toby, the love of her life, and her friend Dorothy. The two women start up a shop in the village, and it is their changing fortunes and feelings for the men on whom so much of their lives are staked which form the core of this funny and vivdly-told novel. The Backward Shadow is a worthy sequel to The L-Shaped Room

Jane's son David is eight years old and Jane is filled with doubts as he grows up without a father. Toby, her first love, has gone to Israel after the collapse of his marriage to Melissa. Then there is Andy, close at hand, a complex personality with his own problem son. In the background is Terry, David's father, an amorphous shadow hanging over them. This intense, compassionate novel completes the the trilogy which began with The L-Shaped Room