Description
DATE OF RELEASE: 13 AUG 2026
By the winner of the Betty Trask Prize – an atmospheric and powerfully menacing story about family, secrets and violence.
John and Liz have left the city to move to a remote house on the shores of a lake. But along with the boxes, they have brought their trouble with them. They find the new house already haunted – by their old disappointments and longing.
Though the house is barely unpacked, Liz’s sister, with her children and husband, have come to visit. Over the course of a hot, slow week, tensions simmer; things go unsaid. And as outsiders descend on the house the atmosphere grows claustrophobic, the pressure near unbearable.
As summer draws to a close, and their family is thrown into crisis, John and Liz must confront what it means to belong to a place – and to each other.
'What animates the novel is a series of tensions: between material stability and emotional turmoil; idealism and conformity; speech and silence; love in the abstract and love in practice; between a life and the life’ TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
'A finely drawn portrait not only of a couple in crisis, but of a world on the verge of disaster … McMullan writes with a masterful naturalism’ FINANCIAL TIMES
'A masterclass in apprehension, exposing the fissures between an imagined life and its reality with stealthy power, and boldly upending reader expectations. Richly unsettling’ DAILY MAIL
Paperback | Publication: 13 Aug 2026, Bloomsbury
ISBN: 9781526678003 | Extent: 304 pages
