Carol Ann Duffy is the most humane and accessible poet of our time, and Rapture is essential reading for the broken-hearted of all ages' - Rose Tremain

The effortless virtuosity, directness, drama and humanity of Carol Ann Duffy's verse have made her our most admired and best-loved contemporary poet. Rapture, her seventh collection, is a book-length love-poem, and a moving act of personal testimony; but what sets these poems apart from other treatments of the subject is that Duffy refuses to simplify the contradictions of love, and read its transformations - infatuation, longing, passion, commitment, rancour, separation and grief - as simply redemptive or destructive.

Rapture is a map of real love, in all its churning complexity. Yet in showing us that a song can be made of even the most painful episodes in our lives, Duffy has accessed a new level of directness that sacrifices nothing in the way of subtlety of expression. These are poems that will find deep rhymes in the experience of most readers, and nowhere has Duffy more eloquently articulated her belief that poetry should speak for us all.

'Myself and Hugh . . . We're taking a break.'

'A city-with-fancy-food sort of break?'

If only.

Amy's husband Hugh says he isn't leaving her.

He still loves her, he's just taking a break - from their marriage, their children and, most of all, from their life together.

Six months in South-East Asia. And nothing she says can stop him.

But when does a break become a break-up?

For a lot can happen in six months. And it's enough to send Amy and her family of gossips, misfits and troublemakers teetering over the edge.

When Hugh returns, if he returns, will he be the same man she married?

Will Amy be the same woman?

Because if Hugh is on a break from their marriage, then isn't she?
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'Mercilessly funny' The Times

'Just brilliant' Sunday Times

'I laughed . . . I cried' Daily Mail

'Full of darkness and light, this is Keyes at her classic and most brilliant best' Red