John Aubrey Pugh, an Oxford don who has given up his teaching post and come to live in a secluded Welsh valley, falls in love with Bronwen Vaughan, the wife of a young farmer who is his neighbour. She is estranged from her husband, an admirable man in many ways, but one who has compelled her to submit to some brutal sexual perversion. When a famous preacher, whose advances Bronwen has rejected with contempt, persuades the entire community that she has committed adultery with Pugh, a reckoning is inevitable, and the ill-fated consequences of their actions are recounted in the testimonies of Bronwen, Pugh and the preacher's cousin, Mr. Lloyd. Patrick O'Brian is world famous for his novels of nautical high adventure, but twenty years before readers were first introduced to Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, he wrote this intensely felt and evocative tale set in the beautiful but often unforgiving Welsh landscape he knew so well. With all the freshness and immediacy that have become hallmarks of O'Brian's style, he conveys the hopes and fears, and tragedy, of his characters, demonstrating the flair and sheer humanity that have made him one of the twentieth century's literary greats.
