A moving story recounted by Margaret, the daughter of a Yorkshire miner, who falls in love with a married teacher and goes to live with him in a room in Camden Town, London. Many critics have observed an almost lawrentian fidelity in the descriptions of their love-making and the intricacies of their emotional responses to one another. But in the end family ties prove too strong for an ambiguous relationship which begins to disclose a chasm of emptiness and bitterness. This brought Storey the 1963 Somerset Maugham prize for fiction.