The woman who talked to herself

A. L. Barker's engrossing novel looks at the life of a middle-aged storyteller, her fictional world and the individuals who inhabit it. Characters such as Mrs McSweeny and her husband Murdo who receive hallucinatory information about the Second Coming; or Elinor Dunphy, an elegant older woman visited by a beautiful and free-spirited young man who makes veiled sexual overtures to her; or Lalla, a divorcee, who falls in love with her son's form-master, only to learn that his apparent advances to her are just a cover for his passion for her son. These humorous yet tragic vignettes are all concerned with unfulfilled and usually perverted sexual relations - but how do they relate to the narrator's own successful marriage?