Landolfi’s only novel to appear in English will please those who like Gothic: though written by a contemporary writer (he died in 1975) and set in the mid-twentieth century, the novel seems a throwback to that nineteenth-century genre. This is a book about strange passions, obsession, solitude, concealment and confinement. It makes its way through dark Jungian abysses...

‘their passion, rather than calming down or becoming more tolerable, blazed so intensely that it took on bizarre, excessive, even fearfully violent forms and manifestations...The husband’s adoration was so overwhelming that he actually set up an altar, on which the young woman had to remain, nude, for several hours of the day and especially the night, in front of burning candles and amid clouds of incense.’ p121