The master bedroom - Tessa Hadley

LONGLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION

Kate Flynn has always been a clever girl, brought up to believe in herself as something special. Now Kate is forty-three and has given up her university career in London to come home and look after her mother at Firenze, their big house by a lake in Cardiff. When Kate meets David Roberts, a friend from the old days, she begins to obsess about him: she knows it's because she's bored and hasn't got anything else to do, but she can't stop.

Adapting to a new way of life, the connections Kate forges in her new home are to have painful consequences, as the past begins to cast its long shadow over the present...

'Bewitching... A prose stylist of quite outstanding talent with a gift for psychological acuity and an ability to encapsulate the human condition' Guardian