Based on the true story of a Victorian schoolmaster who bludgeoned his wife to death on a Sunday afternoon.

Reverend John Selby Watson is a respectable schoolmaster. His offer of marriage to Anne Armstrong is, for her, a route out of poverty: she seizes it. But learned, bookish Watson has little to offer his passionate, tempestuous wife in the way of affection, and the marriage soon curdles and sours. When Watson is dismissed from the school where he teaches, he finds himself devoid of purpose. With no distraction from each other, the couple's bickering and arguments ratchet up and events begin to lead, inexorably, towards their tragic and violent conclusion.

A gripping and ultimately deeply moving portrait of two incompatible lives destroyed by curtailed dreams, for fans of Patricia Highsmith and Muriel Spark.