Minotaur

Kerstin Kvist didn't quite know what to expect when she took up a job with the Cosway family at their odd, almost grand, house, Lydstep Old Hall, deep in the Essex countryside. All that mattered to her then was the fact that it was near London where her boyfriend lived - she'd come over from Sweden to keep their affair going.
The family turned out to be even odder than the house: living at home with the widowed Mrs. Cosway were her three unmarried daughters, in thrall to the old lady; but there was also a mysterious fourth daughter - a widow herself and apparently quite rich - who came and went infrequently, with ill-disguised contempt for the others. Even more puzzling, and increasingly upsetting for Kerstin, was the position of Mrs. Cosway's son, John, a sad, self-absorbed figure in his thirties who haunted the house. Kerstin had trained as a nurse and knew it wasn't right to be administering such powerful drugs to a vulnerable figure like John.
Then, just as she was beginning to get some inkling of what was going on in the house, a stranger with a glamorously Bohemian aura moved into the village, and his presence set the Cosway family on a path to self-destruction.
In Barbara Vine's new book a sympathetic middle-aged Swedish woman remembers her strange and horrifying stay at an old Essex house almost forty years before, at a time when the sixties revolution hadn't quite reached rural England.

Benjamin Tammuz was born in Russia in 1919 and immigrated to Palestine with his family at the age of five. He was a sculptor as well as a diplomat, a writer, and, for many years, literary editor of the Ha’aretz newspaper. His numerous novels and short stories have been widely translated from the Hebrew and have received several literary prizes. He died in 1989.

Translated from the Hebrew by Mildred Budny and Kim Parfitt.?