A writer picks up a beautiful woman on the train from London to Paris, excited by the frisson of a brief liaison with a stranger. But she is not as easy to pin down as he expected and their intense encounter becomes a game of cat-and-mouse along the corridors of the Eurostar and through the streets of Paris. Affecting cool, but being edged towards desperation, the man is forced to recognise the past that he and this elusive woman share, despite his attempts to live a life of fantasy and control.

Powerfully erotic, frighteningly brutal, this remarkable novel revolves around a crime passionel - but not the one the reader expects. With exceptional originality and imagination, Candida Clark explores the complex power struggle at work in the relationship between writer and muse - how the raw material of a woman's life is shaped and distorted in the name of art She depicts a sexual maelstrom, a tense battle of wills where compromise is impossible and only one person can triumph.

Praise for Candida Clark's previous novel:
'The Last Look is as close as prose can get to poetry.' JP Donleavy
'A bright little jewel.' Paul Theroux

In the year 1886, at the start of a long, hot summer in Whitby, a young fishergirl meets a man who has run away from his life, marriage and responsibilities in London. Their intense and dangerous liaison marks not only the rest of her life, but has echoes and repercussions in the literary and theatrical worlds from which he comes.
He is older, sophisticated, troubled by strange desires and resentments, a man who will write a novel that is to become a classic of gothic horror. She is innocent, but not entirely so, ambitious and determined to escape the hard, cold world of the fisherfolk, and the seafaring family whose deaths still haunt her. Thrown together by a violent storm - a storm which became famous in fact and fiction for the wreck of the Dmitry - these two embark on an affair which changes the course of both their lives. While she introduces him to the wild sea, the cliffs, the ruins and the local legends of wrecks and burials, ghostly carriages and the barghest of Whitby - and to his own baser nature - he shows her a glimpse of a wider world beyond. Ironically, he also gives her the wherewithal to grasp it and to transform herself, to venture and succeed in a man's world of ships and money.
In this novel of passion and possession, Ann Roberts has uncovered a small corner of I9thcentury literary history - and round it she weaves a haunting and enthralling fiction. Evocative and mysterious, Moon Rising opens out from those idyllic June days and nights in 1886 to become not only the gripping story of a tragic love affair but also a revealing and unexpected commentary on the genesis of an immortal classic.