From the attic of Lyntons, a dilapidated English country mansion, Frances Jellico sees them--Cara first: dark and beautiful, then Peter: striking and serious. The couple is spending the summer of 1969 in the rooms below hers while Frances is researching the architecture in the surrounding gardens. But she's distracted. Beneath a floorboard in her bathroom, she finds a peephole that gives her access to her neighbors' private lives.

Coles is a film student and he meets two fellow undergrads, Thea and Sam. Coles and Sam come together, but in time, Sam tires of Coles' hedonistic attitude, and they break up. Now ten years later, Coles is doing animation for an advertising agency and living with his girlfriend, Claire. Thea helps run a successful restaurant. Sam, smarting from a bad breakup, returns to New York after several years in London. Coles runs into Sam and discovers he still...

Spellbound before his own portrait, Dorian Gray utters a fateful wish. In exchange for eternal youth he gives his soul, to be corrupted by the malign influence of his mentor, the aesthete and hedonist Lord Henry Wotton. The novel was met with moral outrage by contemporary critics who, dazzled perhaps by Wilde's brilliant style, may have confused the author with his creation, Lord Henry, to whom even Dorian protests, 'You cut life to pieces with your...