This is a book that I picked up on a whim in my local used book store because it is a Virago Modern Classics edition. I'd never heard of the book or the author. The story is about the love between Martin and Hannah. Both are young, in their 20s, and have left someone to be together. Hannah has left her husband behind after falling in love at first sight with Martin, and Martin has chosen Hannah over the financial support of his Aunt Eve. While Hannah's husband is all but absent from the book, Eve is a never-ending presence as she holds the purse strings to Martin's true love - his avant-garde literary magazine that he edits and contributes to. Hannah finds that Martin has no money of his own and they move from hotel to hotel in southern France, first running from bills and then leaving as proprietors refuse to let the deathly ill Martin stay in their hotel. His lung illness is gruesome and described in detail as Hannah nurses him through fits where he loses containers of blood.

The book ends up being a sort of love triangle between Hannah, Martin, and Eve/the magazine. I started out really liking it, was pretty put off by the tone in the middle, and then got engrossed in the end. Especially in the middle, I started to feel like even though the writing is descriptive and romantic I was being kept at a distance from everything. That's strange to feel in such a narrowly focused book. Then I read the afterword and discovered that this is a highly autobiographical work and that [Boyle] really did watch her lover die an excruciating death. Then the distance seemed to make more sense as I imagine this was pretty painful to write. ( )