A Woman-Hater

At a hotel in Homburg, two strangers orbit each other's desperation. Ina Klosking, a gifted singer, has pursued her faithless lover across Europe, wounded by his jealousy and ruined by his gambling. Joseph Ashmead, a theatrical agent, scans the room for someone to save a doomed production. When he recognizes Ina, he sees salvation; she sees perhaps the first hand extended toward her in months. What begins as a professional overture becomes something more complicated: a space for her to speak her heartbreak aloud, and for him to propose something radical in an era that offered women few paths back to themselves. Reade constructs his Victorian melodrama with sharp observation of how love can curdle into cruelty, and how society watches women fail with more interest than it offers them rescue. The result is a book that understands heartbreak is not merely emotional but structural, built into the very architecture of what women were permitted to want.