Eschewing her stale life in London, one woman embarks on a journey of independence and sexual liberation on the French Riviera

Separated from her husband, and with her young son away on a camping trip, Ellen decides to flee her lonely London home, naively pursuing "a jaunt into iniquity" along France's Mediterranean coast. But will she find the escape she longs for, or the entrapment she so deeply fears?

In August Is a Wicked Month, Edna O'Brien's lyric, languid prose creates a character at once ordinary and mythic, struggling to forge her own path not as a wife, mother, mistress, or lover—but as simply, assuredly herself.