Love Child [9781968671273]

Overview

“One of the tiny handful of truly outstanding modern novels.” —Alison Hennegan

At once a chimerical tale of erotic obsession and teasingly brilliant exploration of gender that has lost none of its radical allure.

On holiday at their villa in southern Italy, an elegant, learned woman embarks on an affair with her husband’s private secretary, the enigmatic Ajax. Watching the lovers from the shadows is Kit, the married couple’s adolescent child. A self-confessed “monster”—frighteningly clever, voyeuristic, and cunning—Kit is intellectually precocious but full of the raw, naked emotions of childhood. Gripped by a murderous jealousy, Kit sets out to destroy the affair, and possibly Ajax as well . . .

A groundbreaking novel, first published in 1971, in which neither the narrator nor the antagonist is identified by sex, Love Child delivers all the ingenuity and intrigue of a thriller while standing as “a brilliantly contrived tease that is also a kind of myth for our times” (Michael Maxwell Scott, The Daily Telegraph).