When they sent Garnet Montrose to Vietnam they told him he’d go out a boy and come back a man. But he comes back a freak, so hideously scarred that no one can stand to look at his face. The explosion which destroyed his company has skinned him alive. Living as a recluse on a storm-battered Virginia farm, he dreams of the days when he was eighteen and king of the local dance hall, kept alive by his obsession with the untouchable Georgina Rance. It seems this half-life will never end – until the arrival of Daventry, offering him total love or total destruction… ‘A marvellous tour-de-force. A novel that engages as it entertains, draws the reader in as it draws something out of him. In other words, a very impressive book’ – Publishers Weekly. ‘Mr Purdy writes like an angel, with accuracy, wit and freshness, but a fallen angel, versed in the sinful ways of men’ – The Times