After a bruising experience as a teacher in Africa, Harry Clewe has come to the mountains of Snowdonia in Wales for some peace and quiet. One day, he stops to pick up an attractive blonde hitchhiker ... and his life will never be the same again.  

A desperate and wild obsession ends in a tragedy that condemns Harry to a solitary existence, a loneliness that bears its own depraved and bitter fruit. In the years that follow, his life is changed by a bizarre and ultimately dangerous succession of women. Driven on from crisis to crisis, from one catastrophe to the next, he knows joy, terror, despair ... and finally, the horror of his own worst impulses.  

From the award-winning author of The Cormorant and The Woodwitch comes this disturbing and macabre story of one man's encounter with the savagery of human instincts and the cruelty of fate.