Nathan Staples is a man in pain- consumed by loathing and love in roughly equal measures. Frustrated and apalled by his life and the way he lives it, he is sustained only by his passionate devotion for his estranged wife, Maura, and their teenage daughter, Mary - whom he hasn't seen in fifteen years, and who thinks he's dead. When Nathan contrives to have Mary invited to the island where he lives in retreat he sets in motion the possibility of telling her he is her father, and becoming whole and complete and alive again. The path to grace, though is strewn with obstacles and challanges. The obsessive island-dwellers are trying to cure themselves through trial by extremity while, over in London, Nathan's editor, only friend and one link with his literary career - the brilliant, loyal, hopeless Jack - is drinking himself into the ground. And Mary herself is torn, emotionally, between familial love for the two uncles who brought her up in loco parentis, and the beginnings of a romantic, sexual life beyond. With this third novel, A. L. Kennedy has written a work of something approaching genius- its surface bright with turmoil and damage, its depths profound and turbulent. A brilliant
- ISBN10 0224044338
- ISBN13 9780224044332
- Publish Date 3 June 1999
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 12 April 2005
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Vintage Publishing
- Imprint Jonathan Cape Ltd
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 576
- Language English