Hester Craddock

the long version

Hester Craddock and her sister Nelly live with their aloof brother Wilfred in a cottage on a remote headland. The comfortable monotony of their routine lives is broken irrevocably by the arrival in the local village of the writer Edwin Pallant and his attractive artist friend Halmath Tryan. Casual acquaintance leads to deeper involvement as the protagonists become entangled in a web of shifting relationships, in which the quest for knowledge and experience unleashes the forces of desire, jealousy, and suspicion, with unforseen consequences.