The sea: turbulent and leaden, transparent and opaque, magician and mother... When Charles Arrowby, over sixty, a demi god of the theatre -- director, playwright and actor -- retires from his glittering London world in order to 'abjure magic and become a hermit', it is to the sea that he turns. He hopes at least to escape from 'the woman' -- but unexpectedly meets one whom he loved long ago. His buddhist cousin, James, also arrives. he is menaced by a monster from the deep. Charles finds his 'solitude' peopled by the drama of his own fantasies and obsessions.

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 of Anglo-Irish parents. She went to Badminton School, Bristol and read classics at Somerville College, Oxford. In 1948 she returned to Oxford where she became a fellow of St Anne’s college. One of this century’s finest and most influential novelists, and a distinguished philosopher, she was published by Chatto from her first novel, Under the Net in 1954 to her last, Jackson’s Dilemma in 1995. Awarded the CBE in 1976, Iris Murdoch was made a DBE in the 1987 New Year’s Honours List. She died in February 1999.