Author:Brina Svit

In a brasserie off the Boulevard St-Germain, a renowned novelist watches, entranced, the motions of a young woman's hands folding a restaurant bill into a paper boat.

This passing observation - slim fingers against a white linen tablecloth - provides the springboard for this story of love and jealousy. The novelist's orderly life vanishes the instant he admires this strange woman's hands; the discipline of forty fruitful years dissolves.

On an impulse, he proposes. She answers without hesitation - yes, she will marry him, but only on her terms. She will occupy his house, but not his bed. When she moves in, Kati upends her new husband's meticulous domestic arrangements, then his sanity. Her stubborn detachment transforms the writer from a cool, amused observer of life into a creature ravaged by doubt, passion and jealousy.

With a brutality counterpointed by the elegance and subtlety of Savit's prose, this story dramatises the ruinous consequences of sexual obsession.