In The Book of Guilt, New Zealand novelist Catherine Chidgey conjures a vivid and atmospheric alternative version of Britain in the 1970s. Those who came of age in the era of Spirographs and Stickle Bricks will recognise aspects of this brilliant novel’s world. The three main characters – narrator Vincent and his triplet brothers, William and Lawrence – seem to lead an idyllic existence in one of the Sycamore Homes, part of the Sycamore Project, formed after the Second World War by the great experimental scientist Dr Roach. ‘Before I knew what I was,’ Vincent writes, ‘I lived with my brothers in a grand old house in the heart of the New Forest.’ Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night love them as if they were their own. All, however, is not as it seems.

The Sycamore Project is being discontinued. Vincent and his brothers, who take a mysterious medicine daily, have seen countless boys ‘get better’ and leave the home. Now, the triplets are the only ones left. In a bid to help them adjust to the community beyond the walls, ‘Socialisation Days’ are organised. These expose them to a group of girls from another Sycamore Home. Their insights help Vincent begin to see what the ‘medicine’ is really for, and what Dr Roach means when he calls the boys his ‘little rabbits’. 

Early in the novel, Vincent whittles away at a bar of soap for the visiting Minister of Loneliness; the figure of a girl slowly emerges from the pale green block. In the same way, Chidgey brings the core of her mystery closer to the surface until, suddenly and unsettlingly, all