As the self-loathing Nicola leads her two suitors towards death's precipice, London—and, indeed, the whole world—seems to shamble after them in a corrosively funny novel of complexity and...

The year is 1970, and it's a long, hot summer. In a castle on a mountainside in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on a sea of change, trapped inside the history of the sexual revolution....