A Mild Suicide
Edinburgh, 1976 — Postgraduate love triangle.
In the rain-dark streets of 1970s Edinburgh, Saul Meyer is trying to build a future from scholarship, ambition and marriage. But when he meets Catherine—a fiercely intelligent, emotionally elusive fellow student—his carefully ordered life begins to shift.
As their relationship deepens, the boundaries between loyalty and desire, freedom and responsibility, begin to blur. Around them, the city becomes a world of libraries, smoky bars, ancient buildings, art galleries and winter gardens: beautiful, theatrical and faintly menacing. Through the eyes of Saul, Catherine and Virginia, Christina Koning explores the quiet negotiations of love, the stories people tell themselves, and the damage caused by what remains unsaid.
Elegant, psychologically acute and richly atmospheric, A Mild Suicide is a novel of divided lives and compromised choices. Its restrained prose carries an undercurrent of tension, while its characters move through a landscape shaped as much by literature and art as by their own desires.