"I believe now that I was exposed too early to goodness and that I never recovered,"says Ruth, a beautiful woman possessed by a terrible envy. From small acts of malevolence, she is drawn into a maelstrom of destruction, where innocence and goodness are no defence.
"Sin is reminiscent...of the work of Racine and Laclos. As in Phedre, the
narrative is stripped down to a single, inexorable storyline that centres on the destructive power of passion. As in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, innocence and virtue are cruelly and deliberately betrayed, as the reader looks on with mingled shock and fascination...a tour de force"
New York Times
The elegant, adamantine prose is as powerful as ever...devastation and death, on the scale of a Jacobean tragedy, are contained within a cool and ruthless grasp"The Times