For the last year Hephzibah Anderson has flirted, dated, swooned, and sighed. She has been tantalized by intense conversations, lingering looks and clinches in the back of taxis. She has watched dawn break cradled in the arms of a dangerous ex, sipped cocktails against the Manhattan skyline with a dark-eyed companion, and dined al fresco in the English countryside with a man who promises to be more than just a friend. She has talked, embraced, kissed. But she has not had sex.

Turning on its head the maxim that declares romance dead, journalist Hephzibah Anderson has thrown herself headfirst into finding romance in an age obsessed with sex. Chastened: Adventures in Abstinence is the story of her personal quest to stay chaste for a year, fusing a candid and pithy month-by-month account of her personal challenge with an exploration of what sex means in the twenty-first-century western world. In a welcome antidote to the pole-dancing hen night, Anderson elegantly unpicks our attitudes to relationships; and reconnects with the much undervalued values of courtship and intimate friendship in our lives.