When Rachel, a married and well-respected doctor living in a picturesque and affluent English village, embarks on a dangerous affair with a French painter who has a mental disorder, she finds her life blown wide open when he is accused of murdering one of her colleagues.

In a rediscovered novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Ana Magdalena Bach has been happily married for 27 years, and yet, every August, she travels by ferry to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover.