`You're beautiful,' Johnny told her and so, full of hope, seventeen-year-old Felicia crosses the Irish Sea to England to find her lover and tell him she is pregnant. Desperately searching for Johnny in the bleak post-industrial Midlands, she is, instead, found by Mr Hilditch, a strange and lonely man, a collector and befriender of homeless young girls...

William Trevor's tightly woven psychological thriller won the 1994 Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award. Susan Hill described it as, `A masterpiece. You read and are dazzled. It has one of the most memorable and convincing, most sinister and terrifying of characters created in the modern novel.'