“Perhaps twenty minutes later he realized she had gone to sleep. He quietly removed his now stiff arm, then turned away. It must have woken her a little After a moment he felt her turn as well and lay a hand, instinctively, like a sleeping wife, across his hips; as if, in some dream, he was the one who escaped.”

English novelist

John Robert Fowles was an English novelist, active in the twentieth century, whose work is often placed between modernism and postmodernism. He is known for fiction shaped by philosophical concerns and by the influence of writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. His novels are associated with ideas of choice, freedom, and uncertainty, and with a style that looks back to modernist writing while also moving toward postmodern methods. He remains widely read for that blend of intellectual seriousness and narrative experimentation.