Orkney

He's an academic who assumes his body will be found, still at its desk, pencil in hand, almost turned to dust.  Then she appears, with her white hair, her silky skin, long limbs and that trace of webbing between her fingers. Twenty-one, she sits apart at the back of his lecture theatre, rapt, mesmerised by his retelling of myths and classics: tales of half-men and women in thrall to the sea.

Facing sixty, and with a term's sabbatical, he asks her to marry him. To his colleagues' disbelief, she agrees. They honeymoon on the remotest point of an Orkney island, in a cottage at the edge of the ocean. Their love is intense.

While he draws together his life's work, she sits on the rocks to watch the sea. What is her fascination? What prompts her nightmares about drowning? He gazes for hours through the window, 'expecting to find her resolved into a shadow, a trick of the light. But there she was, apparently substantial.' The colours of Orkney alter, minute by minute, around them. As he loses focus, hers grows deeper.

This is a novel about immersion. It's about an ageing man and the allure of youth. It's also about the boundaries of myth and reality, and should feature on the EngLit syllabus for decades.