Patrick Mcgrath: Constance [2013] paperback

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The aloof and enigmatic Constance Schuyler lives alone in Manhattan. At a literary party she meets Sidney Klein, a professor of poetry twenty years her senior. Intoxicated by her c hilly beauty, Sidney pursues the young woman with restless determination and soon proposes marriage. Constance accepts, and with some misgivings moves into his dark, book-filled apartment.But Constance is a haunted woman. When her father, a doctor, makes a devastating revelation, she is forced to revisit the childhood she spent with her dissipated sister Iris in a broken-down house on the Hudson River. Meanwhile Iris's lover, Eddie, who plays piano in a cocktail lounge, threatens Constance's already shaky marriage, and before long her world begins to fall apart. Her only consolation is the friendship of Sidney's boy Howard, a strange, delicate child, not unlike Constance herself...A compelling story of a troubled marriage and a damaged family, Constance is also a tale of resilience and loyalty, and of the sudden unexpected glimpse of moral inspiration in the midst of crisis that can lead even the most lost of souls back to the light. Show more