Everything about Emily King's world makes sense until the day she meets Lewis Lincoln. He's a handsome and charming economics professor. He's much older than Emily, and terribly sophisticated. And there's something mysterious about him. As her relationship with Lewis deepens Emily realises how little she knows about her lover. At the same time the students she's tutoring in the work of Proust, Balzac and Flaubert seem to offer confusing insights into her own life. Especially when she becomes friends with Margaret Darrow, one of her students, a middle-aged married woman whose husband David is a high-flying lawyer. The correspondences between the story Armstrong tells and the narratives her characters discuss are thrilling and mysterious. Armstrong's debut novel is a compelling, clever romance in which a sensible young woman discovers that life and books can connect in the most unpredictable ways.… (more)