Quake

The lush story of one woman’s erotic odyssey, by a writer of “extraordinary” talent (Maureen Freely, The Observer).

Olivia offers herself to her younger lover Rosairo completely, but he keeps her at a distance, maintaining his relationship with Jess; a university student with whom Olivia grows privately obsessed. When Rosario disappears without explanation, Olivia cracks open the hermetically sealed world of their trysts, abandons her life in London, and pursues him to Italy, travelling south until she reaches Sicily. Here, beneath the sizzling, dangerous sensuality of Mount Etna herself—“like a lady lying on her back exhaling smoke, her long neck voluptuously bare, her hair rippling down where the mountainside is scored in pale streaks, her head thrown back”—Olivia’s quest leads to the ruins of Rosario’s childhood village, destroyed in the earthquake of 1968.

Unpublished during its author’s lifetime, this trailblazinging sensual portrait of female desire is the most powerful thing Kitty Mrosovsky wrote. It was also the last; composed in the late 1980s and early ’90s, after she was diagnosed with the HIV infection that led to her death. “Witty, illuminating and replete with life, an extraordinary one-off performance to savor before the theatre went dark,” writes Maggie Gee in her foreword, Quake is “one of the few works of art that perfectly capture the bliss and tragedy of those phosphorescent years.”