The Tryst by Monique Roffey

The Tryst

Monique Roffey

Introduced as an erotic novella I wasn’t particularly keen to read it. But with the mythical background, the motivations and slowly revealed past experiences of Jane and Bill, this cunningly written magical tale incorporates sex as an essential but not predominant part of the story, and as such captivated me. It makes you wonder about the forces of good and evil, spells and the implications of love, and the mechanisms of the human mind.

Extract
Was I going mad … was my home invaded by an imp? An audacious changeling? Was Lilah a very real creature from tales supposedly made up by once-illiterate housewives? If so, I wanted to know why had those tales been mocked? Like alchemy and astrology, had these creatures been rejected after the Age of Enlightenment? Had they been consigned to myth, ridiculed as 'stories'? I wondered if they were only visible to certain people, if there was some kind of half-breeding or leftover lineage which could be traced back to the dawn of man.
Parallels
  • The Proof of the Honey by Salwa Al Neimi
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
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Violence
Explicit sexual content