'Cunningly clever, wry, dry, sharply pointed.' Evening Standard Ann is fulfilling her snobbish mother's ambitions: she's a BBC secretary, recently engaged to a successful academic. Outside her Hampstead flat, the Swinging Sixties are happening elsewhere, to other people. That is, until she meets the generous and cunning playwright William. Ann is first seduced, then transfixed. As William's nebulous past, present and future swirl kaleidoscopically around her, she finds herself irrevocably and irreparably changed. A darkly comic study of self-deception and the repercussions of sexual freedom, Sweet William is for fans of Harold Pinter, Tessa Hadley and Penelope Mortimer.

Beryl Bainbridge was the author of seventeen novels, two travel books and five plays for stage and televi­sion. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, and among other awards, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whit­bread Novel of the Year and the Guardian Fiction Prize. She died in 2010.