By Shirley Apthorp [Financial Times, 12 January 2007]

Isolde travels with the severed head of her dead betrothed in a jar. Trapped in the claustrophobic confines of a plush ship’s cabin, she is a formidable woman surrounded by brutal men. Her passions are too big for her world, and her doomed love for Tristan will eventually explode from the confines of stifling convention.