Young nursery school teacher Anna, her gruff, uncompromising novelist father Mikhail and his five-year-old son Kolya live fractiously in two rooms outside the city. The adults fall in love, with a medical student and an actress respectively, but Dunmore's bravely unromantic about it - people go to bed together primarily for warmth and comfort. It ?s a terrifying, indomitable, gloomily ambitious read, and stands a strong chance of bagging this year's Orange Prize. Dunmore's lively, sensual prose reflects her background as a poet.