Kissing the Rod: A Novel. (vol. 3 of 3)
1866
A man stands amid the wreckage of his life, and there is no one to blame but himself. Robert Streightley watches his wife Katharine walk out after the death of her father, and he knows he has earned this abandonment. Their marriage was built on a lie he orchestrated, and now the debt has come due: his business crumbles, his reputation lies in tatters, and the woman he loves has left him forever. In this final volume, Yates dismantles a man's entire existence with surgical precision, tracing the psychology of guilt and the terrible weight of what we do to the people closest to us. The novel probes the question that haunts Victorian literature: can a man who has destroyed everything truly rebuild himself, or does he simply learn to live among the ruins? This is melodrama leavened with genuine moral seriousness, a novel that takes seriously the wreckage of broken promises and asks whether redemption is possible when the person you wronged will never forgive you.
