A book of voices, landscapes and seasons, Ann Quin’s newly republished novel mirrors the multiplicity of meanings of the very word ‘passage’ – of music, of time, and of life itself. A woman, accompanied by her lover, searches for her lost brother, who may have been a revolutionary, and who may have been tortured, imprisoned or killed. Roving through a Mediterranean landscape, they live out their entangled existences, reluctant to give up, afraid of the outcome. Erotic and tense, in Quin’s compelling third novel the author allowed her writing freer rein than before and created a work ahead of its time: her most poetic, evocative and mysterious novel yet.