This was one of the best novels I have ever read. The prose was crystal clear and images as fresh as the day Ford wrote them. Its picture of marriage and infidelity so painful that I wonder if our great contemporary psycho-therapist Esther Perel had not coached Ford in the details. The picture of landed gentry in England is both accurate and piteously satiric. I sit this book next to Elena Ferrante and Evan Connell’s “Mrs. Bridge.”