Reaching out over more than a hundred years, A Long Fatal Love Chase tells a story that will touch a whole generation of readers, a story so sensational it could not be published during Louisa May Alcott's lifetime. Rosamond Vivian has been brought up as a recluse by her heartlessly indifferent grandfather on a remote island off the English coast. Her only knowledge of the outside world is derived from the books she devours so voraciously. When Philip Tempest - charming, devastatingly handsome, and almost twice Rosamond's age - mysteriously appears one stormy night, he finds a peach ripe for the plucking. Instead of finding the freedom she craves, Rosamond is caught up in a web of intrigue, cruelty, and deceit stretching far back into the strange past of the man she must call her husband. Fearful that her spirit will be broken, she flees Tempest's clutches, and so the chase begins - across Italy, across France and Germany, from Parisian garret to mental asylum, from convent to chateau. But no sooner does she find each new refuge than Philip Tempest hunts her down - for he has never allowed anything he wants to escape, and Rosamond has become his obsession.