Felicia is unmarried, pregnant, and penniless. She steals away from a small Irish town and drifts through the industrial English Midlands, searching for the boyfriend who left her. Instead she meets up with Mr. Hilditch, who is rooking for a new friend to join the five other girls in his Memory Lane. But strange, sad, terrifying tricks of chance unravel both his and Felicia's delusions in a story that will magnetize fans of Alfred Hitchcock and Ruth Rendell even as it resonates with William Trevor's own impeccable strength and piercing profundity (The Washington Post Book World). 'You're beautiful,' Johnny told her. So, full of hope, seventeen-year-old Felicia crosses the Irish Sea to England to find her lover and tell him she is pregnant. Desperately searching for Johnny in the bleak post-industrial Midlands, she is instead found by Mr Hilditch, a strange and lonely man, a collector and befriender of homeless young girls.
