This is the story of a dinner party a knot of people with pasts & connections which at first seem few but are later found to be many.. . The prevailing mood is urbane: the wine is poured the talk continues & all the time the ice on which the protagonists world rests is being thinned from beneath by boiling emotions & ugly motives.. . No living writer handles the tension between formality of expression & the subversiveness of thought more elegantly Candia Mc William Independent on Sunday