The Mesh by Lucie Marchal

''I hated her when I first saw her. She was so passive, so voluptuous, so unlike me. Then something changed me. Alone with her I was filled with a joy as inexorable as the rising tide. I did not understand why, but I felt compelled to protect her. Thinking about it I shuddered with triumph, thrilled to the very marrow of my bones.' A novel of inbred lives and violent, half-understood desires, The Mesh is a work of 'sensitivity, candor and psychological probing...written in the great realistic tradition of Stendhal and Balzac.' -Saturday Review' -Back cover