Showing The Naive and Sentimental Lover by John le Carré

At the age of 38, Aldo Cassidy in the eyes of the world, if not his wife, is a wealthy and good man. He in ingenious and thrusting. He has founded his own business, his inventions have made him the success story of the pram trade. Nevertheless, inwardly the earnest and aspiring merchant yearns for more: to invest his heart with the same success with which once he invested his talents and his money. Touring Somerset in the protective isolation of his splendid Bentley, vaguely searching for a stately home which, in his fantasy, might supply him with the identity of an English country gentleman, he encounters a charming if wayward couple, Helen and Shamus, and falls in love with them both. Suddenly his prayers have been answered.

By turns their disciple, patron, lover, Cassidy is swept deliriously, ferociously, and yet somehow always innocently into that bewildering world where feeling is the only justification for action; a world at once creative and destructive. His odyssey takes him through Paris, through the intellectual reaches of north London, and finally to the Alps of the Bernese Oberland.

With humour, pain and love, The Sentimental Lover describes the night-walk of a man caught between the two sides of his aspiring nature.