Extract

We are all capable of much more good and much more evil than we imagine.

A famous theater director retires to a remote house by the sea to write his memoirs and practice humility, only to discover that his first love lives in the nearby village, married, aged, and entirely uninterested in being rescued. Charles Arrowby's journal begins in studied calm and accelerates into obsession, jealousy, delusion, and near-murder, as Murdoch dismantles the ego of a man who has spent his life directing others and cannot stop. The sea crashes and glitters through every chapter, beautiful and inhuman, indifferent to human plots. Murdoch won the Booker Prize for this novel in 1978, but its real achievement is darker: a portrait of love as the most sophisticated form of tyranny the self can devise.