The last look - Candida Clark

On a hot summer afternoon, a young English girl arrives to spend the weekend at the house of an elderly American writer, brought there by his Swiss publisher. The writer is dying, she, newly married, is just embarking on her life. As soon as they set eyes on each other, each knows that they have encountered the only person who will ever make them happy; they also know that their love is impossible. There follows a weekend of electric sexual tension and raw passion, a week-end that allows them to live at a pitch that neither has experienced before and will never experience again. Two striking voices, that of the old man and the young woman, tell us the story of their weekend together. We learn about the repercussions on the young woman's life, and how she cannot erase from her memory the man who gave her, briefly, everything life had to offer. Candida Clark conveys the extreme, paradoxical emotions of this novel: tenderness and brutality, love and dislike, anger and boredom, ecstasy and despair. Full of strong, sensual imagery, this is an extremely impressive debut.