It is September 1991, three days before the autumnal equinox. Ronan is driving westwards into Cornwall, looking for the lover he has lost, and desperate to reclaim her. The search will bring him to Roseleye - the gull-coloured house by the sea where Alice has lived for almost fifty years since her time of scandal and disgrace. There, in the shifting light of an animate landscape, Ronan finds himself drawn into a masque of trial and transformation. By the time the equinox arrives he will come to see that more than one kind of death was waiting for him on the Cornish coast.

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"Lindsay Clarke’s stunning Alice’s Masque starts as a story of lost irretrievable love. Ronan has left his wife to search for the lover he should not have abandoned who has taken refuge with the elderly Alice in an isolated Cornish house. The nude, savagely mutilated body of a young woman is found in the neighbouring cove... The interwoven mysteries of present and future climax with immense force and imagination and burst of astonishing beauty." - The Times

"Alice’s Masque is an ambitious and deeply felt meditation on the eternally fraught nature of relationships between men and women and on the fragile possibility of transfigurations and new beginnings." - Times Literary Supplement

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Read an excerpt from Alice's Masque

Interview with Lindsay Clarke

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