Rating: 5 out of 5

Gorgeous use of language. Great complex characters. Some wonderful twists and turns. I wish I’d read it before seeing “The Handmaiden” film which is based upon this story. I now want to see the film again to see the influences more clearly.

Highlighted passages:

Her husband had been a sailor, and been lost at sea.—Lost to her, I mean. He lived in the Bermudas.

if we ever took help at Lant Street, it wasn’t character we looked for so much as lack of it.

It was covered all over with a dead kind of creeper, or with the stains where a creeper had long ago crept;

until the nurses laugh and say they never saw anything so droll.

But words, Hawtrey, words—hmm? They seduce us in darkness, and the mind clothes and fleshes them to fashions of its own.

Her shoes are the colour and texture of roasted meat.

Originally posted to my Goodreads account