Jake is wildly in love with Brett Ashley, aristocratic and irresistibly beautiful, with an abandoned, sensuous nature that she cannot change.

When the couple drift to Spain to the dazzle of the fiesta and the heady atmosphere of the Bullfight, their affair is strained by new passions, new jealousies, and Jake must finally learn that he will never possess the woman that he loves. 'Told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame' New York Times. 'Remarkable, startling, disquieting' Spectator