Kitty, not yet sixteen, lives in India. Repelled by the cruelty and poverty, she persuades her parents to send her to England to her cousin Florence in Cambridge. 

Thomas Cavendish, a distinguished cleric and don in his mid-fifties, lives with his spinster sister and collection of exotic birds. His life is celibate and irreproachable. He is the obvious man to be offered the mastership of this college. But, walking by the river, Thomas sees a young girl in white standing on the bridge. It is an apocalyptic vision and Thomas falls passionately in love. His life alters tragically, and irrevocably, but at the same time, assumes a beauty and joy never previously imagined. 

The obsessive love of a middle-aged man for a young girl is at the centre of Susan Hill's haunting story. But Air and Angels is far more than that. Against the background of India, the East Anglia coast and Cambridge she sets a richly varied cast of characters, eccentric, pathetic and fallible: an undergraduate forced into a loveless marriage, an old woman desperate for affection, the waifs and strays of Imperial England.

In her first novel, since In the Springtime of the Year, she displays all her gifts of psychological insight and evocation of place, but adds a new depth of passion and subtlety. 

Condition: Pre-loved book. Signed to previous owner. Mild yellowing of pages.

Format: Hardcover
Year published: 1988
Pages: 276
Sub-genre: Historical fiction
Imprint: Sinclair-Stevenson