Rachel Waring, an unmarried woman of a certain age (some might call her a spinster), is ecstatic when her Aunt Alicia’s bequest of a house enables her to leave her London flat to settle in Bristol. She quits her job and leaves behind her long-term flatmate Sylvia for what she imagines will now be complete liberation from her disappointing childhood, her dull position, and Sylvia’s endless complaining and smoking. Rachel imagines a life of unbridled passion and kindness and creativity, while acknowledging that she may not have what it takes to sustain such a life: the wit, the courage, the self-awareness. She really tried to make the life she wants, but somehow, unmoored from responsibility, Rachel begins a descent into madness in which nothing is as it seems to the reader. Like her alter ego, Vivien Leigh / Blanche Dubois, Rachel wants to depend on the kindness of strangers—usually men—but whether vicar or druggist or handyman, they all seem to let her down. Stephen Benatar has created the most fascinating and sad unreliable narrator, yet we’re still rooting for her all along not to have her fantasies shattered.