Aidan Higgins s greatest novel has long been unavailable, and is here reissued in a new and revised edition. Balcony of Europe, which was shortlisted for the 1972 Booker Prize, tells the story of a complacent young Jewish wife from San Francisco and a middle-aged Irish painter who meet in a village on the coast of Spain, beginning an affair during the coldest European winter in two hundred years all the while surrounded by a cast of characters as bizarre and hilarious as they are, finally, touching. Lyrical and humorous, heartbreaking and hopeful, Balcony of Europe is Aidan Higgins s crowning achievement.