Published in 2024 (first published 1980)
150 pages
Ann Schlee was born in Connecticut in 1934 and spent parts of her childhood and adolescence in Egypt, Sudan, Khartoum, and Eritrea. She went to boarding school in England and read English at Somerville College, Oxford. In 1957 she married artist Nick Schlee, brought up their four children, and wrote five children’s novels, including The Vandal, which won the 1980 Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. Rhine Journey, the first of her novels for adults, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1981. Subsequently she combined her writing with teaching, becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997.
Lauren Groff is the author of seven books, most recently The Vaster Wilds, Matrix, and Florida. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.
What is this book about?
It is the summer of 1851. An English family is making a romantic journey by paddle-steamer on the Rhine, and Charlotte’s imagination is stretched to the limit – one might almost say, to the breaking point.
She is the unmarried sister of the Reverend Charles Morrison with whose family she is traveling. As they board the boat, Charlotte suddenly mistakes a passenger for the man she gave up years ago, at her brother’s insistence. From that moment, this extraordinarily evocative novel creates an aura of romantic tension that is a compelling as it is mysterious. Charlotte’s interior passion is counterpointed with the stifling manners of the time, and inexorably she is drawn closer to confrontation with the passenger, and herself.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1981, Ann Schlee’s heady novel creates a tension that is as compelling as it is mysterious, forcing her characters to confront each other as well as themselves over one hot summer abroad.
