Longlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction
She smelled like jasmine. No, not exactly. She smelled like the earth beneath a jasmine plant on a hot day.
Most of us are poets, she said. It’s just a question of how it comes out.
When a creative writing academic becomes infatuated with his colleague - the poet - it is not long before it begins to threaten his relationship with his partner, Michael. Michael is beautiful. Michael is safe. But the poet is everything he isn’t; she has everything he wants.
While he writes about steel and sex, she dreams about the movements of swallows. While he tends to his budding career, she writes from her big, white house in the woods. As he slips between his old life and this new one, his fixation grows into something more powerful. The poet, his Kingfisher, is his sole focus. He is hypnotised.
But when simultaneous illnesses threaten to destroy the precarious reality he clings to, he’s forced to question what he can and cannot take from someone. This is a novel about grief, power and desire - and the tangles in between that make up a life.