Brodie Crellin’s debut novel is a queer comedy of manners that delights in its breaking of sexual taboos. A family gathers on the eve of a funeral in a nondescript English village where grief and desire intersect to disastrous effect. Throughout, Crellin prods the fetishes and chicanery of the English upper classes. 

The novel opens with Jude, a haughty and narcissistic playwright in her late twenties, planning to surprise her relatives at a modest house in the Midlands shortly after the death of her aunt Mary. Jude has just returned from a trip to Naples funded by her British upper-crust parents where she spent her time on ‘coffee, writing, sex’ and ‘suffocation, entropy and artistry’. Mary – a ‘rude, Northern’ art teacher – was an unlikely match for Jude’s flagrantly gay and profligate uncle Robin, an ‘English teacher slash actor’ eleven years Mary’s junior. Mary and Robin’s daughter, Patch, who once exhibited an ‘unflinching co-dependency’ towards Jude, is no longer on speaking terms with her cousin. This rift was perhaps widened by Patch’s recent fling with Jude’s ex-­girlfriend. The scene is set for a family drama with a queasy rejection of propriety.

The novel shifts between Robin’s, Jude’s and Patch’s perspectives in the third person as they make flailing attempts to organise Mary’s funeral. Flashbacks reveal their troubled relationships. The family lacks the wherewithal to plan a wake and the emotional reserves to grieve. Robin goes cruising in the woods on the