Passages

All seasons passed through before the pattern formed, collected in parts.

A book of voices, landscapes and seasons, Ann Quin’s newly republished novel mirrors the multiplicity of meanings of the very word passage - of music, of time, and of life itself.

A woman, accompanied by her lover, searches for her lost brother, who may have been a revolutionary, and who may have been tortured, imprisoned or killed. Roving through a Mediterranean landscape, they live out their entangled existences, reluctant to give up, afraid of the outcome. Reflecting the schizophrenia of its characters, the novel splits into alternating passages, switching between the sister and her lover’s perspective. The lover’s passages are also fractured, taking the form of a diary with notes alongside the entries. An intricate system of repetition and relation builds across the passages.

Erotic and tense, in Quin’s compelling third novel the author allowed her writing freer rein than before, and created a work ahead of its time: her most poetic, evocative and mysterious novel yet.

‘After her death in 1973 at only 37, Ann Quin’s star first dipped beneath the horizon, disappearing from view entirely, before rising slowly but persistently, to the point that it’s now attaining the septentrional heights it always merited. I suspect that she’ll eventually be viewed, alongside BS Johnson and Alexander Trocchi, as one of the few mid-century British novelists who actually, in the long term, matter.’ - Tom McCarthy

‘One of our greatest ever novelists.’ - Lee Rourke, The Guardian

‘Quin works over a small area with the finest of tools…every page, every word gives evidence of her care and workmanship.’ - New York Times