LONG LOST, THE

Tor. Good with no dust jacket. 1994. First Edition Thus. Hardcover. 0312858256 . Ex-Library; 26 oz.; 375 pages; 1st Tor HC ED ex library HC no DJ rebound w/library marks/tape tabs o/w very clean/tight/bright condition. A witty, sexy married couple who live in urban England drive to the coast of Wales on a weekend holiday. On a lark, they clamber down a steep cliff to a seaside town that turns out to be utterly deserted. There's an island just off shore and the tide is out, so they walk out across the exposed sand. The empty streets and eerie absence of human voices, followed by the overgrown beauty of the island, seem to transport them into another world, another time. They stumble on an ancient stone cottage, where an old woman with long white hair lies motionless on a pallet. At first they take her for dead, but she slowly awakens. She turns out to be a long-lost relative. She offers no explanation for why she lives alone in a nearly empty, crumbling cottage on an uninhabited island next to a deserted village. The tide comes in. The three of them end up spending the night in the dark cottage. The couple take the old woman back to England with them. Then their lives, and the lives of everyone who knows them, begin slowly and inexorably to fall apart. .