From Amazon
He's an English writer who travels on trains. We do not know his name for the first half of the book. His anonymity is his tool. He travels alone, a skilful predator, taking but never giving, terrified of commitment, instead engineering random sexual encounters with strangers. "For him women are like train tickets felt through the back pocket of an old pair of trousers. They give him the comfortable reassurance of escape".
Like a vulture, he not only uses strangers for sex but picks clean the bones of their lives, stealing their stories for his plots. "My theory is that being a writer is like being a pirate", he admits. "A dirty thief living beyond the law".
London-based journalist Candida Clark's selfish, egotistical central character makes one journey too many. As the Eurostar glides from England's grey suburbia into the sinister darkness of the Tunnel and on to Paris, an intense sexual encounter and mind game ensues. He has finally met his match, someone who knows the tactics too. The roles reversed, the story of his sorry life begins to unravel for the reader.
Like Clark's poetic first novel The Last Look, her second is also a exploration of destructive relationships. With the tortuous sexual tension of a lust-fuelled French movie, it maps the twisted psychology of passion, love, fear and neediness, "the nightmarish mix-up of habit and desire". The suspense escalates to a tragic ending but not necessarily the one you expect. --Sarah Champion
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Review
"An idiosyncratic mix of icy elegance and stewed carnality." --
Guardian"The offspring of Henry Miller and Anais Nin. Writing that restores the sense of novels being a forbidden treat, each paragraph dense with a disturbing erotic perfume that lingers long after the characters have left." --
Independent on Sunday
