All He Ever Wanted
‘I believe an entire story, an entire marriage, was written in that embrace, though I could not have foreseen it then. And based on that experience, I would advise young lovers to be as attentive to the first embrace with the beloved as one would be to a soothsayer…’It is a fire in a New Hampshire Hotel that brings Nicholas Van Tassel and Etna Bliss together – two strangers grateful to have escaped the burning building with their lives. For Nicholas, it is also a chance meeting that lights up a lifelong passion, and sets in train a pursuit of Etna that is to end in their marriage.
But their life together in the same college town of Thrupp is not everything they could have imagined. Many years later, on a train bound for Florida, Nicholas recounts their courtship, and the life they led together. And as the threads of the story begin to unravel, what is revealed is a patchwork of promises, truths, secrets and lies, and a man, madly in love, for whom his wife is all he ever wanted . . .
Reviews
‘Fluent and purposeful in its portrayal of the despair and claustrophobia seething beneath an ordered surface’ Sunday Times
‘Etna is a woman operating under rigorous and agonising self-discipline. Volcanic passions exist beneath her submissive façade…we do not simply experience the characters, fascinating as they are, we experience a whole world’ Joanne Harris
‘A Painful tale of obsession…impeccably done’ Sunday Times