The Girl in a Swing is a brilliant departure for

:he author of Watership Down and The Plague

Dogs--a novel of erotic beauty, terror and sus-

?ense. It is the story of a quiet Englishman swept

out of his settled bachelorhood by an exquisite

~,oung German woman whose beauty stuns him

and whom he impulsively marries--knowing

nothing of her family and nothing of her past--

committing his life, heart and soul to her, only to

discover, little by little, the nature of the dark-

ness and doom she carries with her. From the first

moment--the narrator alone in his house in the

English countryside, remembeting--we are in a

world suffused with beauty and with fear; an

aura of pervasive secrets.., the sounds of water

cascading, crashing (the story is haunted by

the sea)...the scent of a strange perfume...a

woman weeping as if desolation were her

dwelling place.

The man whom we see astonished into love

is Alan Desland--cultivated, intelligent, nice.

Convinced since boyhood that passion and the

sensual life are not for him, he has committed

himself to his bachelorhood, and to the manage-

ment of the family business in fine ceramics and

rare china which is the happy obsession of his

days. Until suddenly, on a trip to Copenhagen,

he meets her--K~ithe. Her beauty is an arrow

through his heart. She moves within a halo, a

nimbus, of erotic energy. This man, who has

scarcely recognized his own starvation, dissolves

into love, amazed that she wants him also, that

she so quickly accepts him--and becomes, as his

wife, even more alluring, both mysterious and

open, possessing a profound dignity yet capable

of entrancing vulgarities, mistress of a hundred

ways of making love, knowing Alan s body bet-

ter than he himself knows it. And we see how