Publisher's Synopsis
Robert Stone's new novel is a tense, penetrating mystery set at an elite college in a New England city. A brilliant but careless professor at the college, Steven Brookman has reluctantly decided that for the sake of his marriage and his soul, he must extricate himself from his relationship with Maud Stack, his dazzling student, whose papers are always late and too long, but always brilliant. Maud, however, is a young woman whose passions - personal, intellectual, social - are not easily contained or curtailed, and their union and their rift will yield tragic and long-reaching consequences.
