Return to Night

This is no polite drawing-room romance, but a probing story of love's power to destroy or heal a man's tormented soul. Mary Renault has dared again to explore the hidden places of the mind, to focus on the symbols men use to disguise their own desires. On the surface this is a strange and searching love story. But beneath the surface . . . what terror does this love conceal? ... From what bottomless pit does it flow towards the light?

Julian Fleming had a rare masculine beauty, a virile perfection of youth and strength. Yet he hated his good looks, and, with a genuine talent for acting, he lightly shrugged away the career he longed for. But in Hilary Mansell he recognized instantaneously the one who could set him free, the woman who had always been part of his subconscious life. She was a doctor, a woman who had kept all the instincts and intuitions of her sex, and Julian saw her first when he was a patient. Even then, in a half-conscious condition, he spoke to her as someone he had always known — and already loved. It was only later that Hilary realized what his words had meant, that they foreshadowed all that would happen to him. . .

Because she loved him, and because she was a doctor, she fought against his passion. Beneath his charm and humor she sensed somewhere a fatal weakness, some flaw that made him ashamed of his gifts and talent. His moodiness and sudden withdrawals seemed a paradox in so winning and attractive a human being.

Or were they, when behind him stood his mother, lonely, conservative, demanding? In what was the secret of her control over her son? And how, Hilary wondered, could she bear to destroy both the actor and the man, leaving only this gentle, uncertain boy with the flawless manners?

Written with keen psychological insight, Return to Night is an intense and moving analysis of love that is death, and of the love that brings life to the darkest caverns of the human spirit. Mary Renault has approached a universal subject with that same sensitivity and lightness of touch which won her such distinction in *The Middle Mist*.