Pauline is spending the summer editing a novel about romantic love, ensconced in World's End, a grey stone cottage set on a hillside in a lushly described English countryside. The original three dwellings are now two, the rustic exterior belying the quietly humming machinery within - computers, phones, faxes, microwaves, freezers, televisions and VCRs. The larger part of the cottage is occupied by Pauline's daughter, Teresa, and her baby, and from time to time by Teresa's husband, Maurice, who is writing his own book about the myth of the British countryside. Teresa's passionate love for Maurice fills Pauline with dread. Her possessive passion for Teresa's father eroded her own youth, as she finds herself recollecting during the long hot summer. It is not just the novel on which she is working that reminds Pauline of her self-destroying jealousy: when Maurice's editor and his girlfriend take to spending weekends at World's End she realizes that Maurice may similarly betray Teresa. But the protective bond between mother and daughter means that Pauline can scarcely endure this. A stunning and unexpected denouement changes the order of things irrevocably for this family, whose intimacy the reader abandons reluctantly at novel's end.