The Italian Girl

Iris Murdoch's tragic-comic tale of sex, class and redemption in 1960's Britain. Edmund Narraway, engraver of modest success, drags himself back to his forbidding childhood home in the North of England for the funeral of his manipulative mother, Lydia. Though he is determined not to be sucked into the complex lives of his drunken stonemason brother and his brittle sister-in-law, he finds it hard to refuse a request for help from his niece. As he's pulled deeper into events which ultimately turn tragic, old certainties are overturned and Edmund finds himself happiest in the company of the Italian Girl, the perennial family servant. But the Italian Girl has secrets of her own.