Claude Wooldridge has it all: a successful antiques business in which his son is safely installed as successor, a palatial home containing earth-mother wife and nubile teenage daughter. But he's also a man obsessed, and when he finds some letters dating from 1817 hidden in the spine of an old Bible, he sets off on the trail of Lord Byron's lost memoirs. So far, so unpretentious; but somewhere in the middle, Luxury of Exile changes gear, and what started out as a pleasant middle-class romp turns very dark indeed as - in a palazzo above the Bay of Naples, of all places - Claude descends into a pseudo-Byronic despair. Buss has spun an interesting yarn out of some unlikely threads, among them incest, betrayal, loneliness and suicide; but his combination of light-as-a-feather writing and heavy, heavy subject matter is unnerving, to say the least.
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