A motley group -- two couples, a kid, a special-needs obesity case, a couple on-site hands -- roughs it together (well there are cabins) on holiday in the Welsh woods. But as the cold winds blow and an evasive bottle of meds goes rogue, everything falls apart. This is all likely an elusive allegory (key characters are named Balfour, Gosling, and Roland), and even with the hair-raising descent into misanthropy and spite, there's something very structurally satisfying about the novel. In particular, a Monopoly board is put out for a game twice, and Bainbridge is very deft in detailing how metal pieces are assigned, where dice are rolled, and who's paying attention. I suspect she was the only writer anywhere who could make a board game come alive in fiction. Hell, even the one-sentence first paragraph ("Balfour, unbearably shy, was waiting for them.") is given symmetric force by the similar final sentence (don't tempt yourself, just wait for it). Inspirational moment: "People changed and in changing affected others, were affected in their turn, a continual process of addition and subtraction. Cut the communication lines and contact was broken, no information could come through. If the breach was serious enough, the lapse of time long enough, one could be fired upon by one's own guns."
