The Girl in a Swing (1816)

About this item

The Girl in a Swing, Richard Adam’s fourth major novel, is set, like Watership Down, in the Berkshire countryside. Yet the story could hardly be more different in content from his previous world-wide bestsellers. This is the haunting and haunted tale, set in the early 1970s, of a passionate love-affair, overwhelmingly beautiful but at the same time threatened by intimations of a frightening supernatural dimension. As with all Richard Adams’s novels, the story, at once ecstatic and deeply lightening, possesses several layers of meaning. From what world has Käthe come? From our familiar world, or from some distant realm of pagan myth? Did it all really happen, or was it yet another of Alan’s psychic nightmares? The Girl in a Swing is a novel of great power which will move and grip its readers in a way wholly unexpected from this gifted and versatile writer. Alan Desland, living in the country town of Newbury, has inherited his father’s business in antique and modern ceramics. An unlikely candidate for the events that are to overtake him, Alan appears a stable, prosperous and scholarly, if slightly unworldly, young man. Only one hint of the danger that lies ahead has been revealed: from adolescence he has been the unwilling, and sometimes unwitting, victim of occasional psychic experiences, whether in dreams or in his daily life. On a business visit to Copenhagen he meets Käthe Geutner, a German girl of extraordinary beauty. Their love is mutual and instantaneous. But apart from the glowing and passionate intensity of their pleasure in one another, what does Alan really know of Käthe, of her life and origins? After their marriage in Florida and return to England, it is Käthe who acquires for almost nothing at a local sale the porcelain figure known as 'The Girl in a Swing' - a ceramic rarity of the greatest value. Their happiness should be complete - but it is not: as their life together is invaded by a growing fear of what has remained unspoken between them, the scene gradually darkens. Omens of impending grief follow upon one another, the Eumenides gather for vengeance, the darkest shadows close in with the awful inevitability of a Greek tragedy. It is a drama which mounts in tension to a terrible and horrifying climax. About the Author Richard George Adams (born 9 May, 1920) is an English novelist, author of Watership Down, Shardik, Maia, The Plague Dogs, Traveller, Tales from Watership Down and many other books. When Watership Down , his first novel, was finally published, after many rejections, it sold over a million copies in record time in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Watership Down has become a modern classic and won both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize in 1972. Three of his novels, including The Girl in a Swing , have been filmed.