Alison MacLeod

It is 1930, and D. H. Lawrence, exiled from his native England, is dying. As the Mediterranean glitters beneath his window, he drifts in and out of visions of the past. He relives the early years of his marriage, when, in an English countryside taut with the threat of war, his desperation drove him to commit a terrible betrayal. And there is another place and time, more like a dream than a memory, of a woman on an Italian balcony, her chestnut hair...

"A woman emerging from mourning spends her savings on a fur coat, a coat she will wear to a dance that will change her life. A professor of cardiovascular physiology lingers on the cusp of consciousness as he waits for his new heart to be delivered, still beating, from another body--and is carried on a tidal wave of memories to an attic room half a century ago. Visiting Sylvia Plath's grave in Yorkshire, the author imagines a conversation with the...