The Nice and the Good - Softcover

"Iris Murdoch is incapable of writing without fascinating and beautiful colour" (The Times)

"Iris Murdoch was one of the best and most influential writers of the twentieth century" (Guardian)

"Irish Murdoch's most versitile novel, and chief among them is the pleasure which the authors take in her characters" (Country Life)

"Just as Jane Austen defines moral categories like "sense" and "sensibility" in her novels, so Iris Murdoch creates new constellations of meaning around those stand-bys of ordinary language, the nice and the good" (Atlantic)

A revolver shot rings through a Whitehall office one hot afternoon in the middle of an English summer. A Government official has apparently shot himself, but the circumstances are questionable – prompting Octavian Gray, head of the department in which the dead man worked, to investigate.

Lawyer John Ducane is charged with the task, interviewing other civil servants by day, and by night attempting repeatedly ― and unsuccessfully ― to break up with his mistress. When Ducane travels to Gray’s Dorset home everything becomes even more mysterious and nothing is quite as it seems.