Passage

A short novel with a wide canvas: a long-simmering love triangle, set in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, from the Booker-longlisted novelist and travel writer.

‘She was standing at the boat’s prow. He thought: this is how I will remember her, looking into the wind, serene. This will outlast whatever is to come.’

Kathleen lies awake in the operating theatre as she undergoes brain surgery, her husband Robert watching. Soon afterwards, the couple leave for an ill-advised holiday in Egypt, together with the third person in their marriage, Robert’s brother Alan. Each of them is aware that the tumour in Kathleen’s brain may be fatal.

For Kathleen, an actor, the trauma of her operation brings a haunting sense of the frailty of her identity. Her descent along the ancient Egyptian tomb corridors – symbols of the passage beyond death – evokes a fevered elation.

Ashraf, their Egyptian guide, is compulsively drawn to her, even as he is caught up in the conflicted politics of his country. As each character struggles with the weight of the past and the uncertainty of the future, the mounting tension resolves in delusion – and a shattering betrayal.

In taut, shimmering prose, Colin Thubron shifts among the perspectives of the four protagonists in a narrative of mesmerising scope and power.