A wife is suspended in a bird cage; a thirteenth-century visionary senses the foreskin of Christ on her tongue: Fleur Jaeggy's gothic imagination knows no limits. In this, her long-awaited return, we read of an 'eerie maleficent calm, a brutal calm', and recognise the timbre of a writer for whom a paradoxical world seethes with quiet violence.

Set in postwar Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy's eerily beautiful novel begins simply and innocently enough: `At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell'. But there is nothing truly simple or innocent here, and as the narrator broods over her schemes to win the affections of the perfect new girl, the novel gathers an unsettling energy.

A fifteen-year-old girl and her father, Johannes, take a cruise to Greece on the SS Proleterka. Jaeggy recounts the girl's youth in her distinctively strange, telescopic prose: the remarried mother, cold and unconcerned; the father who was allowed only rare visits with the child; the years spent stashed away with relatives or at boarding school. For the girl and her father, their time on the ship becomes their `last and first chance to be together.' On board, she becomes the object of the sailors' affection, receiving a violent, carnal education. Mesmerised by the desire to be experienced,...