A Severed Head [Paperback]

A novel about the frightfulness and ruthlessness of being in love, from the author of the Booker Prize-winning novelThe Sea, The Sea

Martin Lynch-Gibson believes he can possess both a beautiful wife and a delightful lover. But when his wife, Antonia, suddenly leaves him for her psychoanalyst, Martin is plunged into an intensive emotional reeducation. He attempts to behave beautifully and sensibly. Then he meets a woman whose demonic splendor at first repels him and later arouses a consuming and monstrous passion. As his Medusa informs him, “this is nothing to do with happiness.”

A Severed Headwas adapted for a successful stage production in 1963 and was later made into a film starring Claire Bloom, Lee Remick, Richard Attenborough, and Ian Holm.Praise for Iris Murdoch andA Severed Head:

“Murdoch was the rare kind of great, buoyant, confident writer who could drive the whole machine.  She was as in touch with animal instincts as intellectual ones. The scope of her vision makes you feel, when you are close to her fiction, that you have glimpsed the sublime.” —Dwight Garner,The New York Times

“One of the great novels about the unknowability of others . . . Like a small diamond full of inclusions, it paradoxically depicts human life at its most crystallized and muddied. —The Millions 

“Combined a kind of dark mythological bent with a cerebral, talkative, psychologically misguided set of characters . . . Murdoch's prose is elegant, validating itself by its own certainty.” —Susan Scarf Merrell, The New York Times

“In my late teens,A Severed HeadandThe Bellopened my eyes to another world.  I took them as a rather elegant form of social realism, and I loved the new world they opened up to me.” —Mary Beard,Times Literary Supplement

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