Marriage Bed — Constance Beresford-Howe

Meet Anne Graham, mother of two young children, young, attractive, heavily pregnant -- and alone. Things have not worked out at all the way Anne intended. Her promising academic career was cut short by an unexpected pregnancy and an early marriage. Her stable home life crumbled with her husband's announcement that he was leaving her to move into a commune with his secretary.

Now she is a housebound single mother, whose intellectual life has shrunk to stolen moments of bedtime reading. The solution to her problem is clear to her friends and neighbours. She must find someone to mind the children and then go back to school or get a job. It's obvious. Or is it?

Once again, Constance Beresford-Howe has approached a common theme from an uncommon point of view, with her own blend of perceptiveness and dry humour.