Andrea Gillies’s second novel explores themes of family relationships, self-deception, and the need for personal mythologies and secrets, set against the vivid colours of a Greek island as summer moves into autumn. Nina, the 45-year-old narrator, suffers a violent accident in the opening pages: ‘Puzzled goat faces peered down as blackness eliminated the sky.’ So far, so good. But then things decline. The accident is explained in one short sentence, dropped casually into the first of a series of uncountable flashbacks (‘she was profoundly unwell by then’); the reader will not learn the nature of her malaise for a long time. A pattern of withheld information begins here.

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