Summer lightning

the long version

Lucy is Andrew's loving fiancee, but Andrew flirts with her best friend. The year is 1913, and the English expatriates living in the small Portuguese copper-mining town of San Domingos are singularly self-absorbed, uncomprehending, and unappreciative of the people among whom they live and work. Threatened uprisings among the miners and a dangerous underground explosion, with the depradations by wolves and the eternal heat and scarcity of water, are merely irritants to their pleasure-seeking way of life.