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’.

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