This novel, discussed by Larkin in his role as a Booker Prize Committee chair in 1977, is a spectacular period piece, a small jewel of a novel (Larkin’s ‘separate world’) set in 1970’s London. Four 60-something nondescript characters work in an office doing nondescript clerical work for a company which does something or other. Over the course of 200+ pages, we learn more and more details about Letty Crowe, Marcia Ivory, Edwin Braithwaite, and Norman ?. Letty’s loneliness, Marcia’s isolation and descent into madness and starvation, Norman’s cynicism and bitterness, and Edwin’s obsessive engagement with the Church are the realities of lives lived and ring true with the themes of modern social isolation, failures of communication, and aging. A lovely jewel of a book.