212 page hard cover, rare and collectible book in acceptable condition, published by Peter Owen in 1972. 

This collection of stories, mostly interlinked and largely autobiographical, chart the descent of the narrator from the onset of neurosis to final incarceration in a Swiss clinic. The sense of paranoia, of persecution by a foe or force that is never given a name, evokes The Trial by Kafka, a writer with whom Kavan is often compared, although her deeply personal, restrained and almost foreign-accented style has no true model. The same characters who recur throughout – the protaganist’s unhelpful ‘adviser’, the friend/lover who abandons her at the clinic and an assortment of deluded companions – are sketched without a trace of the rage, self-pity or sentiment that have marked more recent accounts of mental instability.