Although fiction, this is based on the year long queuing for tickets for a one-off concert by the exiled Stravinsky.

In those days if you saw a queue, you joined it, as it must be for something worthwhile. When Anna joins the queue initially she does not know what she is queuing for, and hopes that it may be a cake, a rare luxury. Over the months friendships are made amongst the queuers, a pregnant woman goes into labour and is taken to hospital by her new friends, and later returns to the queue with her baby, flirtations start, fights break out, gambling cliques take money off the bored and vulnerable.

You get a good idea of the privations that people suffer in order to keep their places in the queue - jobs are lost, lies are told.

As the months go by it becomes clear that some of the main characters have links to the composer Selinsky of the forthcoming concert - admiring musicians, friends, a now elderly ex-lover, her child (Selinsky's child?).

A fascinating insight into the hardships of the time, and a wonderfully written cataloguing of emotions, relationships changing - sometimes from utterly selfish to selfless - as events unfold

Riveting, emotional roller-coaster, unputdownable - definitely one to read again