’Delicate, measured detail that is reminiscent of Anita Brookner’--DAILY TELEGRAPH

’A painterly novel, full of lovely Bonnardesque detail ... intense emotion is counterpointed with an evocation of landscape in the tradition of the best romantic fiction’---THE TIMES

’In the time it takes for her to walk from thc bathhouse at the seawall of Fortune’s Rocks, where she has left her boots and discreetly pulled off’ her stockings, to the waterline along which the sea continually licks the pink and silver sand, she learns about desire.’

It is the summer of 1899, and Olynlpia Biddeord and her parents have retired from the heat of Boston to the coastal resort of Fortune’s Rocks. When the celebrated essayist John Haskell is invited to slay, no one foresees the aflair that is to follow. What begins as the briefest of silences becomes a relationship that is both passionate and destructive, six short weeks that will shape the rest of their lives ...