BODILY HARM

A young woman leaves the Turkish baths and looks into a kitchen shop to buy some knives. For no reason understood either by her or her assailant, she is viciously attacked and left for dead. The rest of the book tells of her recovery, the trial and sentencing of her attacker - told in alternate chapters written in the first person - and, perhaps a touch too inevitably, of their meeting and the building of a relationship. The narrative is compulsive, the characterization convincing, and the nervous tension of the whole novel at once unsettling and satisfying.