AustLit

'The Island of Mus lies in the Adriatic off the coast of Yugoslavia. There Tito's partisans maintained a precarious base while the Germans ruled over almost all the country; there David Pelham, a young surgeon, was sent to minister to the Yugoslav wounded evacuated from the ferocious fighting on the mainland; there Moja Javich came to help him as a nurse, orderly, aide-de-camp, provider of material resources and spiritual solace; there they made love. Through the searing heat of summer and the winter cold; through the dirt, the smells, the omnipresent flies; through the apathy of idleness and the awful carnage of battle, their love kept them sane and transcended all the horrors of day-to-day existence. Mus for Pelham was to become "the place of youth, the place of blood-sacrifice and wine, of love and the smell of gangrene. Above all of near madness". Their love itself was near madness. And in the end they all went away and Mus returned to its primordial calm.' (Source: dustjacket, 1976 Collins edition)