Quake

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The lush story of one woman's erotic odyssey, by a writer of "extraordinary" talent (Maureen Freely, The Observer ). Olivia offers herself to her younger lover Rosairo completely, but he keeps her at a distance, maintaining his relationship with Jess; a university student with whom Olivia grows privately obsessed. When Rosario disappears without explanation, Olivia cracks open the hermetically sealed world of their trysts, abandons her life in London, and pursues him to Italy, travelling south until she reaches Sicily. Here, beneath the sizzling, dangerous sensuality of Mount Etna herself—"like a lady lying on her back exhaling smoke, her long neck voluptuously bare, her hair rippling down where the mountainside is scored in pale streaks, her head thrown back"—Olivia's quest leads to the ruins of Rosario's childhood village, destroyed in the earthquake of 1968. Unpublished during its author's lifetime, this trailblazinging sensual portrait