Judith is an aspiring young actress and the mistress of a writer on a popular satirical magazine. Her life has increasingly become a dangerous mixture of drugs and self-delusion. When she eventually suffers a breakdown, she seeks healing in an Indian ashram run by an eccentric and even possibly mad guru. But what is at the back of appearances? How calculated is the self-destructiveness from which a new order might emerge?

Judith returns to England and joins up with Bert, one of a few friends who have helped her. Bert is making a film about an anti-Bomb demonstration outside a US airbase; the demonstrators have threatened to detonate a bomb themselves in protest. Within this increasingly chaotic setting Judith is led, by way of a search for a lost child of one of her friends, to a place of stillness at the centre. But what attitude makes sense in this sort of world? Who survives?

Judith is the third novel based on the interlocking fortunes of the characters in Catastrophe Practise.