Marise Tomelty is a child-wife who dislikes sex and is terrified of open spaces. Ralph Shilling lives in the flat above the Tomelty's and is a dealer in pesticides. Marise's commercial traveller husband casually mentions that he recognizes Ralph as John Brown, acquitted for lack of evidence of an atrocious double murder. Nevertheless, Marise encourages Ralph's attentions, in need of the exciting combination of passion and fear. A serious exploration of the nature of our experience of ourselves and each other, of the tug between body and soull, life and death, truth and fantasy, this is an extraordinary novel written in the precise ,impeccable prose for which A L Barker is so famed.
- ISBN10 1860497209
- ISBN13 9781860497209
- Publish Date 2 September 1999 (first published 6 April 1989)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 31 December 2009
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
- Imprint Virago Press Ltd
- Format Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
- Pages 224
- Language English