Unofficial Rose - Softcover

"Manipulating masterfully, Miss Murdoch turns out a deft three-in-one book: a sort of combined superior soap opera... a British novel of sensibility, and philosophical inquiry into reality" (Time)

"I suspect that when the intellectual map of our own times comes to be sketched out, Iris Murdoch will occupy a position analogous to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky... Murdoch writes better than anyone about the condition of being love: both the ecstatic joys of it and its capacity to turn otherwise decent individuals into monsters of selfishness and cruelty... Her vision of the world is heart-rending, but ultimately celebratory" (A N Wilson)

This is the story of nine people, each of whom is looking for love, and the resulting complex relationships between them, impelled by affection, lust, lost scruple, illusion and disillusion, wanting to be free yet needing to be involved.