Philip Womack

Malign Spirits

The Possession of Mr Cave

By

Jonathan Cape 244pp £12.99 order from our bookshop

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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