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For psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. David McBride, death exerts an unusual draw. Despite his profession, he has never come to terms with the violent accident that took his brother's life, a trauma that has shaped his personality and subsequent choice of career. But, when a failed suicide, Elizabeth Cruikshank, comes into his care, he finds the deepest reaches of his suppressed history being reactivated. Elizabeth is mysteriously reticent about her own past and it is not until David recalls a painting by the Italian artist Caravaggio that she finally yields her story. As she recounts the chance encounter, which took her to Rome, and her tragic tale of passion and betrayal, David begins to find a strange and disturbing reflection of his own loss in the haunted "other side" of this elusive woman. Through one long night's dialogue, they journey together into a past, which brings painful new insight and uncertain resolution to each of them.
The Other Side of You is a powerful meditation on art, and on love in all its manifestations. In distinctive, graceful prose, Salley Vickers explores the ways both love and art can penetrate the complexities of the human heart, to invade and change our being, and the possibilities of regeneration through another's vision and understanding.
The Other Side of You is a powerful meditation on art, and on love in all its manifestations. In distinctive, graceful prose, Salley Vickers explores the ways both love and art can penetrate the complexities of the human heart, to invade and change our being, and the possibilities of regeneration through another's vision and understanding.
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Reviews
"Love and pain, death and life, self knowledge and insensibility - all these big, vital themes converge in this moving, utterly engrossing novel."
The Guardian
"The writing is so good and the structure so skilful that Vickers manages to make delicate and difficult notions vivid. Her territory is the faultline along which memories of loss are experienced by an individual both as integral to their identity and as constraints on their engagement with the present. This may be true of a great deal of fiction, but it is rare for a novel to present it so directly and with such success."
John de Falbe, Spectator
"Vickers' astute descriptions of jealousy, passion and grief shift seamlessly from one character to another in the present without faltering … In her experienced hands the characters are complex without being contrived. Vickers has turned a thwarted romance in to a serious page-turner."
Time Out