Awful Beauty: The Confessions of a Coward

More about the book

The narrator of Awful Beauty falls in love with a Russian prostitute he meets in London while living there with his wife, an American heiress who married him when she was 17. Awful Beauty is one of a trilogy of novels anatomising three kinds of love, as defined by the author: illicit, earned, and found. It is the first of these that is central to this book ¿ a passionate illicit lovers¿ knot tied within the narrator¿s tangled journey towards the accidental love that is paradise. Awful Beauty is a true love story that pivots on the attraction of the heroine¿s extraordinary beauty, but which also highlights the irresistible pull of shared cultural references and experience, the fatalistic optimism of the Russian soul and the never ending, risk-seeking quest of a gambler.