Available Formats
Mrs Sartoris
By (Author) Elke Schmitter
Translated by Carol Brown Janeway
Faber & Faber
Faber & Faber
1st July 2005
Main
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
833.914
Paperback
160
Width 128mm, Height 198mm, Spine 10mm
123g
Mrs Sartoris is a provincial German wife and mother, perfectly ordinary seeming. Yet she harbours secrets and enmities which have been simmering since her teenage rejection by a well-born lover. Calculating yet impulsive, narcissistic, passionate and deadly, she remains contained within a grey and conventional existence. At late middle age, Mrs Sartoris is confronted by danger: a lover who brings her sensual release and humiliation in equal parts, and a man who has ensnared her biting, ironic, withdrawn daughter in a slavish and dangerous relationship. A fleeting opportunity - a male figure in a raincoat on a deserted street late at night - offers the chance of a lifetime's revenge.
"'A story of rupture and revenge... Schmitter captures precisely the nuances of sexual obsession.' Literary Review; 'A triumph of understated emotion.' Independent; 'A modern-day Madame Bovary... suspense saturates this novel.' Daily Telegraph"
Elke Schmitter was born in 1961 in Krefeld, Germany and studied philosophy in Munich. She worked as a journalist until 1994, when she became a full-time writer.