A Shot in the Dark
David Garnett
‘David Garnett, the distinguished English author of ‘LADY INTO FOX’ and ‘ASPECTS OF LOVE’, is a writer with charm, wit, gaiety and a cool understanding of the varieties of passion he so brilliantly portrays. In his new novel, which is set in the golden olive-studded hills of a small Italian town, he writes of the love affair between Robert Harcourt and Gemma and Caroline, the English girl whose beauty moves Gemma to a poignant and conflicting desire. Robert, an expatriate American, had come to San Frediano to write and to forget the unhappy love affair which had driven him from England. But San Frediano, like Caroline, would not leave him in peace. First, he found himself caught up in the town’s daily life and its strange inconsistencies: the jazz which blared nightly from the bishop’s palace, the pagan elements in the Church itself, the bitter politics which divided neighbor from neighbor. Finally, San Frediano threw him bodily into the arms of Gemma, the apothecary’s daughter. Through her love, with its abandoned sensuality, Robert found himself confronted with yet another aspect of the town: the cult which, in the secluded woods and moonlit groves around it, payed homage to a pre-Christian goddess. It is Robert’s struggle to retain Gemma’s love which brings about the climax – at once tender and shocking – of this moving novel. For when Caroline reappears, these three play out an ancient triangle against a background of mounting hatred and desire: a ritual dance which mesmerizes Gemma into a love beyond her control. Mr. Garnett’s urbane treatment of this delicate theme lifts his novel from the merely sensational to that plane where all forms of love, sacred and profane, mingle in a passionate statement of human involvement.’ – dust jacket flaps.
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Complex, fast-moving adventure story, involving a great number of lesbians ~ Marion Zimmer Bradley
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Details
| Genre | Pulp |
| Publication Date | 1958 |
| Publisher | Little Brown and Company |
| Format | Hardcover |
| No. of Pages | 216 |
| Language | English |
| Rating | NotRated |
| Subject | Bisexual women – Fiction; Lesbians – Fiction |
| BookID | 11754 |
