ROSET REMAIN ONCE wrote: 'I deliberately seek out the strange, the unfamiliar, even the unknowable.' It is in her attempts to domesticate them that she has always produced her best novels. She seems, paradoxically, to be most at home in her writing when she has strayed farthest from her own experience.

Her last book, Music and Silence, winner of the Whitbread Prize, was a remarkably convincing account of the experiences of an English lute player at the court of the Danish King Christian IV The Colour, which tells the diverse stories of people caught up in a feverish gold rush in