The Three Lovers

London, in the years when desire and duty still pretended not to know each other. Patricia Quin is twenty-one, gloriously unsophisticated, and about to discover that love is not the straightforward business the novels promised. She meets Edgar, and then she meets another, and suddenly the question isn't whether she can have what she wants, but whether wanting itself is something she's allowed to feel. Swinnerton writes with the precision of a surgeon and the warmth of someone who has actually been heartbroken. His London is smoke-hazed and electric, where dinner parties last until dawn and a single glance can rearrange your entire future. This is a novel about the particular cruelty of having to choose, when every choice costs something you can't name until it's already gone. The three lovers circle each other with the tension of people who know they're about to do something they'll regret, but do it anyway. It crackles.