Quake

A lush, labyrinthine novel of one woman’s erotic odyssey, and the final testament by a neglected writer of extraordinary talent,

An Italian idyll: After meeting on the slopes of Mount Etna, Rosario, a young Sicilian, accepts British student Jess’s invitation to join her at the villa where she and her friends are spending the summer. There, the enamored couple eat, drink, and make love amidst a backdrop of gossip, betrayal, and witty banter . . .

Or so Olivia, Rosario’s bookish, older lover back in London, imagines. Recently arrived in the UK, he stumbled into her English-language class, then insisted they meet up that evening. Olivia knows she has no claim on this man with whom she is infatuated, but still she finds herself increasingly curious about her unknown rival for his attentions. But the more desperate her avenues of enquiry, the more elusive become both her sexual adversary and Rosario himself. Finally Olivia breaks from her orderly routine and travels to Sicily in search of his origins, in the ruins of his childhood village, destroyed in the earthquake of 1968.

Unpublished during its author’s lifetime, this trailblazing, sensual portrait of female desire is Kitty Mrosovsky’s most powerful work. It was also her last: written in the mid-1980s, shortly before she was diagnosed with the HIV infection that led to her death. “Witty, illuminating and replete with life, an extraordinary one-off performance to savor before the theatre went dark,” writes Maggie Gee in her foreword, Quake is “one of the few works of art that perfectly capture the bliss and tragedy of those phosphorescent years.”