Minotaur

On the day of his forty-first birthday, an Israeli secret agent encounters a beautiful young English woman. He immediately recognizes her as the woman he has been searching for all his life, the one he has loved forever. Though they have never met, he is certain that she is an essential part of his life’s destiny. Using all the tricks of his trade and his network of contacts, he takes control of her existence without ever revealing his identity. Alexander Abramov’s desperate, dangerous love for a woman half his age consumes everything in its path: time, distance, and rival suitors. Only his own story, of a life conditioned by isolation, distrust, and murder, can explain his devastating manipulation of the woman he professes to love. Four lives are entwined in this intricate story of a solitary man driven from one side of Europe to the other by his obsession. Riveting and full of suspense, as in the best spy-story tradition, Minotaur is also a highly inventive and original literary novel. Tammuz is a skilled writer whose commanding style makes of Alexander Abramov’s story a moving allegory of every man’s search for love. From the paperback cover. "Kerstin Kvist didn't quite know what to expect when she took up a job with the Cosway family at their odd, almost grand, house, Lydstep Old Hall, deep in the Essex countryside. All that mattered to her then was the fact that it was near London where her boyfriend lived - she'd come over from Sweden to keep their affair going." "The family turned out to be even odder than the house: living at home with the widowed Mrs. Cosway were her three unmarried daughters, in thrall to the old lady; but there was also a mysterious fourth daughter - a widow herself and apparently quite rich - who came and went infrequently, with ill-disguised contempt for the others. Even more puzzling, and increasingly upsetting for Kerstin, was the position of Mrs. Cosway's son, John, a sad, self-absorbed figure in his thirties who haunted the house. Kerstin had trained as a nurse and knew it wasn't right to be administering such powerful drugs to a vulnerable figure like John." "Then, just as she was beginning to get some inkling of what was going on in the house, a stranger with a glamorously Bohemian aura moved into the village, and his presence set the Cosway family on a path to self-destruction." "In Barbara Vine's new book a sympathetic middle-aged Swedish woman remembers her strange and horrifying stay at an old Essex house almost forty years before, at a time when the sixties revolution hadn't quite reached rural England."--BOOK JACKET “With echoes of Kafka and Conrad,” the acclaimed Israeli author of Castle in Spain offers “a provocative, spare, slow-to-unfold mystery of character” ( Kirkus Reviews ). On the day of his forty-first birthday, Israeli secret agent Alexander Abramov encounters a beautiful young redhead on a city bus. He immediately recognizes her as the woman he has been searching for all his life, the one he has loved forever. Though they have never met, he is certain this young woman named Thea is an essential part of his life’s destiny. Using all the tricks of his trade and communicating through anonymous letters, Abramov takes control of Thea’s life without ever revealing his identity. Soon, Abramov’s desperate, dangerous love for a woman half his age consumes everything in its path: time, distance, and rival suitors. And for Thea, keeping her lover safe from the amorous “Mr. Anonymous” becomes an obsession of her own. Only Abramov’s own story, of a life conditioned by isolation, distrust, violence, and murder, can explain his devastating manipulation of the woman he professes to love. Hailed by Graham Greene as “the best novel of the year” upon its initial release in 1981, Minotaur is a highly inventive literary thriller. An Israeli secret agent falls hopelessly in love with a young English girl. Using his network of contacts and his professional expertise, he takes control of her life without ever revealing his identity. Minotaur is a complex and utterly original story about a solitary man driven from one side of Europe to the other by his obsession