Set within an isolated community, Philip Robinson's debut novel opens with the arrival of Michael, an artist, who has been commissioned to paint a portrait of Lord Palmer, owner of the remote estate of Inchnamactaire - the island of the wolf. Escape from London and its attendant distractions, should have proved just the tonic to repair Michael's wounded relationship with his wife, Lucia, but best-laid plans soon turn rotten with the arrival of the community's Head Gardener. As events take on an increasingly menacing nature, Michael's relationship with Lord Palmer's daughter, the spirit of the local landscape, Magda, threatens to disturb the strange but delicate balance between residents of the estate and nature. With a keen sense of the horror that lurks within us all, and a remarkably subtle touch, this elegiac novel works towards an inevitable, terrible denouement.
A hymn to the natural world and the virtues of time which will beguile and disturb the reader in equal measure, That We Might Never Meet Again is a novel of lust, betrayal, deception and violence by a writer of rare imaginative talents.
