Terence Cave, the snobbish, wannabe aesthete at the centre of this troubling, compulsive novel, has dealt with the suicide of his mother and the murder of his wife; and he has watched his son Reuben fall, fatally, from a lamppost as his supposed friends look on, yelling in encouragement. Now all he has left is his daughter Bryony, a cello-playing, pony-loving ‘dream of a child’ where Reuben was ‘the dark sleep I could never comprehend’.

The novel takes the form of an extended letter to Bryony: ‘when you read this account you will look behind what I have done and a kind of truth will emerge’. As such, the intimacy creates a clotted, overwhelming claustrophobia, which captures exactly (and aptly) the feeling that an adolescent