London during the blitz provides the background to this startling and monumental novel. It's characters, brought together by the Reading Room of the British Museum, are ever more closely linked by the upheavals of war. Each one in his own way seeks the spiritual strength to meet the great crisis: the civil servant and his novelist wife, the young scientist gathering top secret data, the music critic, the student, the anarchist, the young strangers from the New World. As they meet and find love and friendship, antipathy and hate, and they vividly debate their wifey divergent views in a series of brilliant dialogues unequalled in contemporary literature for their scope and originality of presentation.