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Aristocrat Sophia Willoughby chases after her errant husband to Paris, falls in love with his mistress instead, and ends up at the barricades of the 1848 Revolution. Sophia is by turns sympathetic and appalling – a masterclass of a character – and the novel is both witty and powerfully grief-stricken. Isobel
Sophia Willoughby of Blandamer House, upstanding Victorian matriarch, has packed her errant husband off to Paris with his mistress Minna. But when tragedy throws her life off balance Sophia goes to seek him out, and instead finds herself intensely attracted to the charismatic, bohemian Minna, who leads her on a wild, chaotic adventure through a city in the throes of revolution. 'One of the great under-read British novelists of the twentieth century.