Book description
Oxford. May Morning. Pouring rain. Eighteen-year-old student Tessa
Reeves has a close shave with death as Dr Michael Edwards comes hurtling
round the corner in his scarlet MG. By way of apology, he treats her to
a lavish breakfast in a country hotel, and over strawberries, steak and
champagne, she first experiences his greed - a greed which later
culminates in electrifying sex.
Tessa, from the wrong side of the tracks, brought up with no frills -
and no father - by the irrepressible but decidedly uncultured April,
feels overawed by the pressured mystique of Oxford. But the charismatic
Michael boosts her spirits and her status, and fires her own ambition.
He has been named after an archangel - the conqueror of Satan, the
Prince of Light.
But it is darkness which descends as the affair turns sour, and Tessa
searches in increasing desperation for her lost lover, and later for his
surrogate and namesake, the suburban GP, Dr Michael Edwards, with whom
she develops a bizarre non-relationship. Spellbound, her love becomes an
obsession, and her question for Michael Michael takes over her whole
life.
The novel comes full circle to May Morning the following year, and on
this second fateful May Day, she finds her own fruition in an
extraordinary consummation.
Tessa’s odyssey is the strangest and most poignant tale Perriam has
ever told, yet recounted with all the exuberance and sit which have made
her exceptional among contemporary writers.
‘Sex, retribution, madness . . . Wendy Perriam is back on
characteristic form with guns firing.’ Val Hennessy, Daily Mail
Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her
first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and
told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read
History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs,
ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her
time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she
went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed
for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written
extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor
to radio programmes such as Stop the Week
and Fourth Column
.
Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences - strict
convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and
divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic
Bedlam - have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for
shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the
well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in
a straitjacket.’
