Rosa Lane is a fashionable journalist in her thirties, already the picture of London achievement. Her handsome boyfriend is something in politics and her other friends are confident, prosperous and ambitious. But one afternoon, staring at her computer screen at work, she fails to see the point, walks out of her job - and begins her long fall from modern grace.

JOANNA KAVENNA is the author of The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule. She has written for The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications.