The Ransomes, a middle-aged, middle-class couple living in North London, return home to their mansion flat, from a night at the opera, and discover they have been burgled. But this is no ordinary burglary. Every single thing in their home has been taken. They are greeted with only bare floor boards and walls. All the possessions they are left with, in the world, are the clothes they are wearing.

In this novella, Alan Bennett strips this middle-class couple of all their belongings and therefore forces them to re-examine their position in society, what does it mean to be them. In very Bennett style, the wife here flourishes, using this as a chance to explore the local community around her, that previously she had just passed through to get to somewhere else. The husband, though, stripped of his possessions, fails to cope. All that seemed to have made him, his possessions, have been taken away.

This is a slim volume but Bennett still manages to pack a punch with his sparse prose, with many touches of his sharp and on-the-nail humour. Though not a subject always associated with him, this is Bennett on firm territory, he knows these middle-class people and what brings them down.

Bennett uses an unusual premise to write a character study of a couple suddenly thrown out of the rut their lives had comfortably fallen into. As with much of his previous prose, this is a short but enjoyable read, and easily re-read.

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