This remarkable, evocative novel re-creates the meeting, marriage, and separation of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes; from the scarlet lipstick and headband Sylvia wore on the night they first met to the yards of red corduroy curtains left unfinished at her death, Emma Tennant constructs a ballad from images of their lives and poetry. As Sylvia and Ted struggle to create both life and art, their duet becomes a duel, creating a vortex of sensation and passion that draws others into its path, including Sylvia's darkly beautiful rival Assia Wevill.
"Steeped in Hughes' and Plath's resounding poetry and blessed with a dramatist's sense of timing. Tennant has written an arresting and exquisitely mythopoeic tale of love, death and immortality."—Booklist
