Blending literary suspense, travelogue, and a spirit of uneasy eroticism, D'Stair (author of One Year of Desire) plumbs the heart and needs of a bored academic, Helen Bonaparte, on a restless tour of Italy she's undertaken to get out of her rut at home. But Helen can't stand the giggling girls and impassioned teachers on the tour and is fully prepared to mope her way through until she meets the tour guide, Marieke. Helen immediately forms an obsessive, strange, and poetic attachment to the beautiful young woman, an attachment whose unsettling qualities are echoed in the novel’s references to suspense master Patricia Highsmith, as Helen imagines an Italy “infused with Highsmith's pulse” and the rich details of the author’s world: “a hand resting on a hotel door, a pulled trigger,” and more.

The evocatively named Helen is still mostly sullen on the trip, except with a vivacious man named Richard, who becomes her travel buddy. Wrapped up in her own narrative, Helen continues to fixate on the details of Marieke's beauty, even as she's reminded of her partner, Marcel, and children at home. As she plunges deeper into fantasy, the narrative alternates between first- and third-person, suggesting a protagonist getting swept away. Soon, after a charged scene before Michelango's David, Helen surreptitiously takes a bite of food with Marieke's fork, just to have a "chance to feel her tongue." Things get increasingly weird as Helen takes advantage of being in Marieke's room to put her toothbrush in her mouth as well as leave her scent—a scene that jolts.

Helen Bonaparte brings poetic vigor to Helen’s imaginings and occasional pushing of boundaries, deftly mingling desire, tension, and the feeling that things could go very wrong. This is a full-bodied, sumptuously written, always perceptive study of yearning for something more, as Helen works through a moment of existential crisis, eager for connection. D'Stair’s prose startles, dazzles, informs, and pleases.

Takeaway: An academic’s obsession plunges her Italian tour into charged erotic suspense.

Comparable Titles: Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, Madeline Stevens’s Devotion.

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: B
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A-