In Penelope Fitzgerald’s historical novel, two strangers wake up in the same bed after a bicycle crash. Complications, of both heart and head, ensue.

In 1912 Fred Fairly is a Junior Fellow at the college of St Angelicus in Cambridge. He lectures in physics and worries about the universal problem known as ‘the absurdity of the Mind-Body relationship’. The young woman beside him when he wakes up one evening in the Wrayburns’ spare bedroom might help to resolve it, but how can he tell if she is quite what she seems? Fred is a scientist. To him the truth should be everything, and indeed he thinks it is. But scientists make mistakes.

Shortlisted
The Booker Prize 1990
Published by
Collins
Publication date
Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald

About the Author

The novelist and biographer Penelope Fitzgerald won the Booker Prize in 1979 with Offshore before executing a poacher-turned-gamekeeper u-turn and joining the 1991 judging panel.
More about Penelope Fitzgerald

Other nominated books by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Beginning of Spring
Offshore
Prize winner
The Bookshop