Many years into the future, city life has broken down, communications have failed and food supplies are dwindling. From her window, a middle-aged woman - our narrator - watches things fall apart: hordes of people migrating to the countryside, gangs of children roaming the streets.

One morning, a young girl, Emily, is brought to the house by a stranger and left in her care. A strange precocious adolescent, unafraid of the harsh world outside, she is slowly drawn into the tribal streetlife and its barbaric rituals. Meanwhile, the narrator watches and waits, and as civilisation crumbles, retreats into her hidden world, where reality fades and the past is revisited...

'Brilliant, persuasive and circumstantial in its imagination, so that each step towards barbarism seems completely necessary. From a reality of food shortages and adolescent gangs to the final image of all but a few cave-dwellers flavouring rabbit stews with the weeds sprouted from cracked pavements, the novel carries you forward with such total conviction that it comes as a shock to step outdoors and find the traffic merely at a standstill, the buses only running late, as usual.'

NEW STATESMAN

'An extraordinary and compelling meditation about the enduring need for loyalty, love and responsibility in an unprecedented time.'

TIME

'Quite possibly you're one of those people who for some years and books now have been reading Doris Lessing to find out what's going on - what is happening to our society's nervous system and how it affects the way we live with each other... She is one of those acute emotional intelligences whose stories provide keys to our personal dilemmas.'

W.L. WEBB, 'Guardian'