Patrick McGrath

In the summer of 1959, Max Raphael becomes deputy superintendent of a remote hospital for the criminally insane. His wife Stella, beautiful, yet isolated, befriends a patient, Edgar Stark, and the affair between them develops into an obsessive, destructive love.

An old man is sleeping fitfully. It's too hot. The air is thick with Spanish Jasmine floating in from his overgrown garden. And he's not sure whether he'll be woken by General Franco sitting on the end of his bed. It's 1975 and Francis McNulty is nearing the end of his life but feeling far from peaceful.

A veteran of the Spanish Civil War, he is tormented by grief and guilt about a brief, terrible act of betrayal from that time; and he's started seeing his old nemesis on the street, in the garden and now in his bedroom. Neither he nor his daughter Gillian, who lives with him in Cleaver square, know what to do. When Gillian announces her impending marriage to a senior civil servant, Francis realises that he must adapt to new circumstances - and that the time has come to confront his past once and for all.