One long hot summer in the 1880s Bram Stoker escaped to Whitby from the pressures of theatre life in London. These months are unaccounted for in life of the irish-born theatre manager, and around them Ann Roberts has woven a passionate, mysterious and enthralling fiction. In Whitby he has an intense and dangerous affair with a young fisherlass from an old seafaring family, who introduces him to the wild sea, the wrecks, the ruins and to local legends (many of which find their way later into Dracula), and to his own weaknessess and desires. The novel starts with their meeting many years later, by which time she's a successful ship-broker and he's an old man, but intriguingly it takes several chapters before we realise who this mystery man is. As things fall into place, the novel becomes not only a haunting mystery but also a woman's story of the tragic love affair which marked the rest of her life, as well as a highly original commentary on the genesis of that immortal classic, Dracula.
