'An extremely original and disconcerting story' - Daily Telegraph
A girl returns from boarding school to her sleepy Merseyside hometown and waits to be reunited with her childhood friend, Harriet, chief architect of all their past mischief. She roams listlessly along the shoreline and the woods still pitted with wartime trenches, and encounters 'the Tsar' - almost old, unhappily married, both dangerously fascinating and repulsive.
Pretty, malevolent Harriet finally arrives - and over the course of the long holidays draws her friend into a scheme to beguile then humiliate the Tsar, with disastrous, shocking consequences.
A gripping portrayal of adolescent transgression, Beryl Bainbridge's classic first novel remains as subversive today as when it was written.
- ISBN10 0006146503
- ISBN13 9780006146506
- Publish Date March 1977 (first published 28 August 1973)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 17 October 2003
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint HarperCollins Distribution Services
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 158
- Language English