Rated a very respectable 3.8 out of 5 on Goodreads, this book was adapted as a Broadway musical and film. Set in mid-nineteenth-century Italy, Passion tells of a love triangle involving Giorgio, an officer in the Italian army; Clara, a robust young married woman with a child; and the grotesque, vampire-like Fosca, who embodies the romantic macabre. The relationships, one involving adultery and the other a flouting of social conventions, are treated with warped extremity, at once serious and ironic.