Orphaned, friendless and bewildered, young Felix Latimer comes to war-time Jerusalem to lodge with Miss Bohun, one of the most redoubtable (and ridiculous) of comic horrors in English fiction.

Olivia Manning, OBE, was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, spent much of her youth in Ireland, and, as she puts it, had 'the usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere'. The daughter of a naval officer, she produced her first novel, The Wind Changes, in 1937. She married just before the War, and went abroad with her husband, R. D. Smith, a British Council lecturer in Bucharest. Her experiences there formed the basis of the work which makes up The Balkan Trilogy. As the Germans approached Athens, she and her husband evacuated to Egypt and ended up in charge of the Palestine Broadcasting Station. They returned to London in 1946 and lived there until her death in 1980.

From the most considerable of our women novelists a compelling portrait of a relationship between a young man and a matriarch.