In the 'middle of life' Lavinia reviews her frustrations, her solitariness, the grief and the rapture, her seeming companions in a pageant presided over, as it were, by the masks of Owl, for winter, and Cuckoo, for erotic love. Dreaming of Dead People, first published in the UK in the 1970s, remains as surprising, frank, mordantly funny and raw as ever.
