It was shortlisted, too, for the 1981 Booker Prize, losing out to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

But it became a runaway bestseller in America (where the cover depicted a flame-haired nude woman in a rocking chair), winning the Los Angeles Times fiction prize, while in Britain it won the Cheltenham fiction prize and was picked by both William Golding and Graham Greene as their Book of the Year. Women’s groups hated it, and several critics lambasted it for exploiting historical tragedy for pornographic purposes, as well as for its similarities in sections to Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar. After moving to Kiev, Lisa is finally exterminated, together with her infant son, at Babi Yar, impaled through her genitals with a bayonet by a German soldier. Thomas was best known for his experimental third novel, The White Hotel (1981), a troubling work, told in part through poetry and partly through an erotic journal, which revolves around Lisa, a young Jewish opera singer, and her accounts to Sigmund Freud of often deeply unpleasant sexual fantasies that prefigure the Holocaust and leave masses of corpses in their wake. DM Thomas, the novelist, poet, playwright and translator, who has died aged 88, was hailed by some as one of Britain’s most remarkable writers, but the dark and sexually explicit content of much of his work (“I am obsessed by sex,” he once admitted) led others to dismiss him as the “dirty old man” of English letters.

Hunters in the Snow by D.M. Thomas