'One of the finest novels I have read in years' John Banville, Observer

'It was the start of my second new life, in a city that had a spin of its own - a wilder orbit inside the earth's calm blue-green whirl. New York wasn't open to the hopelessness and lost purpose that drifted around lesser places . . . '

Meet Bobby, Jonathan and Clare. Three friends, three lovers, three ordinary people trying to make a life for themselves.

In the harsh and uncompromising world of the seventies and eighties, they are outsiders, misfits, dreamers without a blueprint. But as they form a new kind of relationship, a new approach to family and love - questioning so much about the world around them - so they hope to create a space, a home, in which to live.

'Intensely, almost painfully intimate. A superb and major novel' David Leavitt

'A writer of great gifts. Cunningham's voice reaches that lyrical beauty in which even the grimmest events suggest their potential for grace' The New York Times Book Review

'As well as being fluent and attractive, this intimate saga of our times is immensely wise' Mail on Sunday

'Cunningham writes with power and delicacy of his three characters. Yet each one retains the mystery that in people is called soul, and in fiction is called art' The Los Angeles Times