Iris Murdoch’s darkest novel is also her funniest. Novelist William Sutcliffe put it best when he noted A Severed Head has “less philosophising and more shagging than Murdoch's other books”.

Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a well-off wine merchant in London, believes he has arranged his life neatly: a civilised marriage, a discreet mistress, a respected psychoanalyst brother-in-law. Then his wife announces she is leaving him for the psychoanalyst. What begins as bourgeois farce turns into something stranger – a study in self-deception, humiliation and the unstable nature of desire.

This seventies Penguin paperback edition ties in with the forgotten film adaptation of Murdoch’s novel (with a screenplay by Frederic Raphael, who would later go on to adapt Eyes Wide Shut with Stanley Kubrick), and features a surreal sepia still on the cover.