From the author of The Gustav Sonata At the moment that Colonel Browne is standing in the shallow end of the swimming pool of the Hotel Alphenrose, preparing for his late afternoon dip, his daughter Charlotte, carrying a suitcase, is getting out of her car back in England, preparing to rob the ancestral home. It is not just another it is the culmination of hundreds of days, hundreds of disappointments and misunderstandings, and thousands of very small lies... Over a million Rose Tremain books sold ‘A writer of exceptional talent ... Tremain is a writer who understands every emotion’ Independent I ‘There are few writers out there with the dexterity or emotional intelligence to rival that of the great Rose Tremain’ Irish Times ‘Tremain has the painterly genius of an Old Master, and she uses it to stunning effect’ The Times ‘Rose Tremain is one of the very finest British novelists’ Salman Rushdie ‘Tremain is a writer of exemplary vision and particularity. The fictional world is rendered with extraordinary vividness’ Marcel Theroux, Guardian