An intense, moving novel about obsessive love in the vein of Josephine Hart’s DAMAGE, from the author of A WOMAN’S LIFE and THE SPACE BETWEEN.

K, a middle-aged painter, has come back from Mexico to attend a wedding in an English country church. But the church is empty and silent. The wedding has been postponed. Like an ancient mariner, he finds he has been away too long, and has returned perhaps at the wrong moment – either too early or too late.

When K first saw Claudia fourteen years before, he fell instantly and dangerously in love. He managed to forget he had a wife and a life already full. But Claudia was little more than a child then, twenty-four years his junior, beautiful but unformed. Perhaps it was no surprise that their love proved to be so destructive.

Now, years later, he returns to find this new bride, his old love, is on the verge of a very different future. But the past, inevitably, awaits them both – and he is determined to take her back there…