Savage Love

Savage Love is a 1978 romance by Mary Wibberley. The book's mechanism is the sudden return of a husband, a device that lets a short novel start in the middle of an emotional problem that is already three years old.

Kim has spent those three years recovering from being left by Luke Savage, and by the time the story opens she believes the recovery is complete. She travels to Westmorland to help her cousin run a small hotel because she is needed, and the arrangement that was meant to be a favour turns into a trap when she discovers that Luke is staying there as a guest.

The novel's tension is the difference between the competence Kim has developed and the feeling that returns the moment she is in the same building as him. Wibberley wrote for the category market through the 1970s and 1980s, and the settings in her books are usually working places, here a small hotel in a remote part of northern England, which keeps the couple in proximity without contrivance. The category form gives Kim almost no room to retreat, because the work she came to do and the man she is avoiding occupy the same building for as long as the season lasts.