Minotaur

“Thea, This letter…is not signed and I daresay we shall never meet. Yet I have seen you and I have made sure that you saw me…You didn’t recognize me. But even so, you belong to me. You will never have an opportunity to ask me questions, but my voice will reach you through my letters, and I know that you will read them.”

Thus begins a bizarre correspondence. The writer first sees Thea on a bus. With her dark hair, honey-colored eyes and regal bearing, she is the mysterious beauty he claims to have been searching for all his life. Thea is bright, intellectual, sheltered and romantic.He, a secret agent, becomes Thea’s phantom lover–unseen, unknown, except through the hypnotic letters with which he bewitches her heart and soul. The reader awaits every letter as tensely as Thea, and feels equally frustrated and upset by the cruel anonymity that he demands.Tammuz’s masterly writing makes the narrative utterly convincing: both Thea’s growing love for her unseen partner and the obsessive desire for innocence and beauty that she inspires, despite the incredible circumstances.

Selected Best Book of the Year by Graham Greene in The Observer, 1981, and by David Pryce-Jones in the Financial Times, 1983.