The Girl in a Swing

infobox Book |
name = The Girl in a Swing
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption =
author = Richard Adams
cover_artist =
country = United States
language = English
series =
genre = Suspense novel
publisher = Knopf
release_date = 12 Apr 1980
media_type = Print (Hardback & Paperback)
pages = 339 pp (hardback edition)
isbn = ISBN 0-394-51049-6 (hardback edition)
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"The Girl in a Swing" is the fourth novel by Richard Adams, author of "Watership Down". It was first published in 1980, with significant editorial changes in subsequent editions. It was adapted by director Gordon Hessler into a 1988 film starring Meg Tilly.

Plot introduction

Alan Desland, a socially awkward Englishman, meets a mysterious, beautiful woman. Overwhelmed by passion, he marries her almost immediately, but when he brings her home, they are inexorably followed by eerie consequences of her past.

Plot summary

Alan Desland is a collector and dealer of fine pottery. On a business trip to Copenhagen, he falls headlong in love with Käthe (or in some editions, Karin), a young woman who does clerical work for him and one of his colleagues. After ten days of mutually infatuated courtship, he proposes marriage to her despite knowing nothing about her family or background. She accepts on the condition that their wedding should take place as a civil ceremony in England, and appears to have no interest in inviting any relatives or friends of her own from Europe.

In the event, their marriage and honeymoon end up taking place near Gainesville, Florida in the United States, thanks to the intervention of an American acquaintance. Her playful sensuality overwhelms Alan, continuing to captivate him and their entire social circle after their return home to run his family's ceramics shop. However, Alan's psychic senses (mostly latent since adolescence) begin to warn him that something has gone wrong, building up to a catastrophic revelation of tragedy.

Characters

*Alan Desland:An English ceramics dealer and collector. Until he meets Käthe/Karin, his personality is very reserved to the point of asexuality.
*Käthe/Karin:A young woman from Germany whom Alan meets in Copenhagen. In Adams' original manuscript, she was named Käthe Geutner, but almost all of the first editions with that name were withdrawn from print because of a libel suit by a real woman with the same name. In subsequent editions, her surname was variously changed to Forster or Wassermann; her first name was sometimes also changed, to Karin.

References

*cite book | title=The Girl in a Swing | last=Adams | first=Richard | authorlink=Richard Adams (author) | publisher=Knopf | location=New York | id=ISBN 0-394-51049-6 | date=1980