“Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered; as a broken link, a biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality, a once complex object that now dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a l like a fallen speck of soot on a blank sheet of paper.”

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.