When the unnamed narrator, a reputable physician and rising MP, meets mysterious, compelling Anna Barton, ``the shock of recognition passed through my body like a powerful current. Some of the people she encountered saw that trail and run away, most did not see it but were attracted to the sheer hypnotic elegance of the movement. We believe that the untried soul, trapped in its young prison, might have flown free and known the joy that we still seek.

Luis Malle made a stunningly successful film with Juliette Binoche and Jeremy Iron in the key roles.Thanks only to the encouragements of her editor that the novel was finished as it was probably intended from the beginning. The title for review comes from the novel, and seems the most quoted whenever the book is discussed. Always an obsessive reader, I had read six books a week during a particular four years in a small town in Ireland after a double family tragedy, and continued this voracious consumption of novels after I left Ireland. She got frightened by its inevitable trajectory and left it untouched for many months having considered it far too dangerous to continue.

And to watch those trapped by genius forced to sacrifice themselves, and those trapped by talent to emulate them.Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city.