Youthful beauty, intellectual brilliance, physical passion, tragedy, and disgrace are all in this wonderful novel, as told through the eyes of a 14-year-old girl.

Sophie is a self-contained, exceptionally bright child who has no known parents and has spent all of her life in a children's home. Her life is transformed when she wins a scholarship to Tatham's, a kind of Oxbridge university for teenagers.

But this is only the start of an education as much emotional as intellectual. Sophie falls hopelessly in love with Lucas, adored gay son of a wealthy Jewish family and, through him, is drawn into a tangle of betrayed friendship and forbidden passions that ends in tragedy and disgrace.

Spanning the years 1975 to 1979, the chapters alternate between school terms and holidays, between Sophie's dogged pursuit of the glittering prizes and her slow, painful discovery of who she is and where she belongs. Through other people's families, and especially other people's mothers, she learns as much about the mysterious laws of class and love as she learns from her teachers about the Latin and Greek that will prove her passport to security.