Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen’s 1938 novel superbly captures the pain and awkwardness of adolescence. A young orphan girl, Portia Quayne, goes to live with her half-brother, Thomas, and his wife, Anna, in their large house near Regent’s Park in London. As she is groomed to become a lady she encounters the attractive cad, Eddie and falls in love. Sent off to the Kent seaside town of Seale-on-Sea (a thinly veiled Hythe in East Kent, which features in three of Bowen’s novels), Eddie follows her down to stay for a weekend.

When they go to the cinema one evening with a group of friends, the flash of a cigarette lighter illuminates a romantic betrayal. As author Anna Cottrell has noted, the cinema becomes ‘a site of bitter realism, where dreams are destroyed rather than generated.’