A girl returns from boarding school to her sleepy Merseyside hometown & waits to be reunited with her childhood friend, Harriet, chief architect of all their past mischief. She roams listlessly along the shoreline & the woods still pitted with wartime trenches, & encounters 'the Tsar'
- almost old, unhappily married, both dangerously fascinating & repulsive. Pretty, malevolent Harriet finally arrives
- & 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.