The Oven House [Paperback]

"...she feels raw, like burnt skin, like nails broken below the quick, the breath in her throat as sharp as razors, though she has no right to feel any of this, as she is the one burning and breaking and cutting up the life they have shared for ten years."

The Oven House explores the unpredictable nature of desire and what happens when obsession and excitement erode our connections with reality. Erotic and painfully perceptive in its portrayal of the workings of guilt, it reveals the selfishness and grief, as well as the tenderness, that accompany love.

Lynne Rees teaches on the creative writing programme at the University of Kent. A prize-winning poet, The Oven House is her first book-length work of fiction.

When the daylight leaks away she begins her routine of warming up the cottage. She lights candles along the deep window ledges – the flicker of them makes the curtains’ blue gingham checks dance – and incense sticks she bought in Price’s Candles Factory Outlet that smell of something woody and green. And she makes herself eat. But not raw, cold food. It has to be cooked and hot. She lights the rings on the narrow gas stove and warms a bottle of red at the side – a 1996 Rioja or an estate bottled Shiraz. (She found a magnet sticker in a charity shop that said Life’s too short to drink bad wine and bought it for David, but in the meantime she has it snapped to the metal frame of the kitchen window to remind her she doesn’t have to be hard with herself. Not yet.) She poaches salmon, warms green pesto sauce with olive oil, and serves it on a bed of rocket, or she sautés slivers of chicken breast with rosemary and garlic, toasts slices of ciabatta under the grill. She sips the wine as she prepares her meals, the room lit by one lamp and the hand-dipped candles, listening to Miles Davis or Al Green or, when music isn’t enough, she puts the TV on to quietly flicker and chatter away in the background.
After the second glass of wine her head and belly are warm, relaxed, and she is convinced she can get through this. He’s gone and maybe it would have happened at some time in the future anyway. Maybe it would never have worked despite what they said to each other. There was too much heat too soon – it burnt itself out. Maybe it’s better like this. And as long as she’s doing something, and being kind to herself, perhaps the days won’t scrape by so painfully.
She doesn’t blow the candles out – she leaves them to burn down as she slips into bed, the cotton cool, a trace of him still there, or is it her imagination tricking her now? But it almost hurts, the press of the duvet against her shoulder, like weight, and like weightlessness too, until her own body heat starts to wrap around her.

But then the nights sneak up on her.