The main character, Kate Brown, is a domestic goddess who spends one summer rediscovering herself and her place in the world after some 20 years of marriage and motherhood.

It might sound like a relatively dull premise for a novel, but in Lessing’s hands the book sings with great storytelling, intellectual insight and drama. Kate Brown is no dull housewife: she’s a complex woman suffering what can be best described as empty-nest syndrome. Her grown up children are getting on with their lives and her husband is working in America for an extended period, leaving her to her own devices for a summer.

Good at languages — Italian, French and Portuguese — she accepts a temporary translator job at a conference in London for an organisation called Global Food. She does so well and enjoys the work so much, her stint is extended and she is promoted. Before she knows it she is one of the main organisers of another conference, this time in Istanbul, and it is here that she embarks on an illicit affair with a younger man and goes on a European road trip with him.

The affair, however, is disappointing, and stuck in rural Spain with a lover who has fallen ill, she returns to London alone. Here she holes up in a hotel — the family home has been rented out for the summer — only to become drastically ill herself. Lonely and depressed, Kate’s sanity begins to crumble and there are a few wobbly moments when she tries to make sense of who she is and why her life no longer holds a meaningful purpose.

It’s not until she takes a room in a house occupied by a much younger woman that Kate is able to confront her demons and find the courage to forge on with a new life in which her husband and children are no longer her sole focus.