Three
This enigmatic novel, from one of Britain's most important writers of the post-war avant-garde, explores suicide, marriage and class
Three opens with the disappearance at sea, possibly suicide, of a young woman, identified only as S. A middle-aged couple, Ruth and Leonard, had been spying on their young lodger in their summer house by the sea, and now begin to pore over her diary, her audio recordings and her movies - only to discover that she had been spying on them with even greater intensity.
As this disturbing, highly charged act of reciprocal voyeurism comes to light, and as the couple's fascination with S comes to dominate their already flawed marriage, what emerges is an absorbing portrait of their triangular relationship and of the emotional and sexual undercurrents of 1950s middle-class life.
Ann Quin (1936-1973) was a working-class writer from Brighton, England. She was at the forefront of British experimentalism in the 1960s along with BS Johnson and Alan Burns. Prior to her death in 1973, she published four novels: Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972). A collection of short stories and fragments, The Unmapped Country (edited by Jennifer Hodgson), was published by And Other Stories in 2018. Quin’s novel Berg was republished by And Other Stories in 2019, followed by Three in 2020.
