Whichever way you try to sum up the plot of this elegant little novel, it turns out wrong. Jenny flees to Italy to escape her incestuous passion for her brother: too sensational. Jenny's Italian interlude: too flat. Jenny discovers herself while hanging out in Naples with a taciturn Scottish marine biologist and a glamorous Italian couple: too twee. It is, in fact, a perceptive study of an emerging consciousness. Slowly, subtly, Jenny develops from a negative and somewhat self-deprecating presence to a positive, though hardly confident, one; she begins as a black-and-white outline and is gradually filled in by the colours and textures of Naples - and not always bright, sunny ones, either. Shirley Hazzard achieves an extraordinary density of tone in this slim little book, which is as poised and vivid today as when it was first published in 1970.
