Based within the Celtic fringe of Britain, Tristan and Isolde is a dazzling exegesis of love, both disarmingly psychological and profoundly mythological. Shaw’s version heightens the latent Dionysian tensions and at the same time masterfully transmits a story that can be located in the experience of every reader.

‘We’d loved till we were beyond speech, or civility, or even humanness. We were fiery planets colliding in the black bed of space. We’d been stretched heavenly like lute strings, snapped harsh a hundred times over. We were so dumbed by love we couldn’t even recognise transgression, maybe only initiation.’

Tristan & Isolde by Martin Shaw, available from Cista Mystica Press (2022).