Love as a Stranger

Sarah, nearing sixty, and her husband Robert have left Hamilton for an inner-city Auckland apartment while he has chemotherapy, and with few friends in the city she fills her days with walks and cafés. In the Symonds Street Cemetery she pauses by the headstone of Emily Keeling, a girl killed in 1886 by a man she had turned down, and a stranger named Hartley, recently widowed and lonely, begins to talk to her. Coffee turns into friendship and then into an affair full of understanding and desire, the first of Sarah's long marriage. But Hartley's love edges towards obsession, with disquieting demands and a hint of menace, and Sarah has to choose between him and her family.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

Love (assigned by AI)

Set in

New Zealand

First published

2016

Author's age

75 when first published

ISBN

9781775538578 (Vintage, New Zealand)