Long read
During a romantic journey down the Rhine, one woman’s imagination is stretched almost to breaking point in Ann Schlee’s gloriously evocative novel.
In the summer of 1851, Charlotte takes a paddle steamer down the Rhine with her brother’s family. As they board the boat, she suddenly mistakes a passenger for the man she gave up years ago, at her brother’s insistence. And so enters an aura of romantic, erotic tension that is as compelling as it is mysterious. Charlotte’s inner passion is brilliantly balanced by the stifling manners of the time, as she is drawn inexorably towards confrontation with the passenger, and herself.
Ann Schlee
About the Author
Ann Schlee was brought up in America and spent parts of her childhood and youth in Egypt, Sudan and Eritrea - a peripatetic existence that was reflected in several of her novels
