Wounded and angry, she turns to her mother for support, only to discover that the past has also come back to haunt Cora, a person who always seemed utterly flawless.For now comes evidence of Cora's own long-ago relationship with a famous man, a man who so adored Zeph's mother that he never forgot her.
When art dealer Catherine Sergeant meets John Brigham, her view of the world has been shattered. Left by her husband Robert without explanation, she expects little from life. Apparently reclusive, John lives alone in a beautiful Arts and Crafts house on the edge of Dorset woodland, and has contacted Catherine's firm so that he may sell unwanted items. But when the two discover a mutual love of the haunting Victorian faerie artist Richard Dadd, their friendship rapidly deepens. As Catherine and John begin an affair that is to change their lives, John reveals an astonishing secret that links him to Dadd. Deeply sensual, THE GIRL IN THE GREEN GLASS MIRROR is a journey not only through love and obsession, but also through the world of Richard Dadd, whose tortured life was more extraordinary that any fairy tale.
'I am sixteen. I am as old as the century'It is 1916. Vincent is sixteen, on the brink of manhood. Vincent is aristocratic and privileged, frequenting the salons of Paris while France is at war and the city almost deserted of men. In that brutal summer, Vincent's beauty and precocity captivate two men: Marcel, some thirty years his senior, a writer and celebrated socialite; and Arthur, the twenty-one year old son of one of the servants, who is now a soldier at the front. Both relationships become love affairs of a kind - of the mind or of the body. Vincent intuitively tries to keep his passions separate, but over the weeks of indolent Parisian summer and far-off war, confidences are made, absences endured, secrets revealed. All of these men will suffer, and Vincent will lose the last vestiges of his childhood innocence. In the Absence of Men is a stunning first novel: in its daring in representing Marcel Proust as a character, in the beauty of its prose and in its delicacy of feeling. It is a quite remarkable debut.