Description
“Quietly enthralling, unnervingly erotic, Daylight is a dazzler.” Emma Donoghue, author of Slammerkin
Brian “Bad” Phelan, New Zealander and bomb disposal expert, likes to live dangerously. While on vacation on the French/Italian border in 2001, he helps to bring a body out of a rocky, wave-swept cove. The dead woman bears striking similarities to a young woman he met years ago, under mysterious circumstances, shortly before she disappeared in a flooded French cave. Bad is compelled to investigate.
Jesuit Father Daniel Octave is making his own investigation, into the truth behind the story of the life of the Blessed Martine Raimondi, a WWII resistance heroine and martyred nun. Bad and Daniel’s questions lead them to Eve, the beautiful widow of a celebrated French artist, and to Dawn, Eve’s twin sister, who seems to be a vampire. For, thought they don’t know it, Bad and Daniel are looking for the same thing – a family secret.
Sensuous and heavenly, Daylight combines Elizabeth Knox’s greatest gifts, her wildly imaginative storytelling and her clear eye for atmosphere and place. The vampires of Daylight are distinctly Knoxian, as intriguing and intelligently drawn as the angel in The Vintner’s Luck. Daylight is set on the beautiful Mediterranean coast stretching from Avignon to Genoa, yet much of it takes place in a world the tourist never sees, a world of caves and secret passages. It is in the “world beneath the world” that Bad Phelan and Daniel Octave find themselves face to face with history and myth, with phantoms whose hearts are still eating, and hungry, and able to break.
Elizabeth Knox is the author of many best-selling books, including Billie’s Kiss, Black Oxen and The Vintner’s Luck, which won the Deutz Medal for Fiction in the 1999 Montana New Zealand Book Awards and the 2001 Tasmania Pacific Region Prize. Her other honours include the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship to Menton.
“on a par with the best Anne Rice has to offer” Publishers Weekly (US)
Softcover, 356 pages. In excellent pre-loved condition.