“One hot summer day, Michael Salter, nineteen-year-old scion of a posh Highland family, disappears. When his childlike aunt claims she drowned him during a fight, the family close ranks. No police. No memorial service. No titbits for village gossips. A decade of deceit begins.” —Financial Times
The Salter family orbits around Peattie House, their crumbling Scottish highlands estate filled with threadbare furniture, patrician memories, and all their inevitable secrets. While gathered to celebrate grandmother's seventieth birthday, someone breaks the silence. The web begins to unravel. But what is the white lie? How many others are built upon it? How many lives have been shaped by its shadow? Only one person knows the whole truth. From beyond the grave, Michael loops back into the past until we see, beyond perception and memory, how deeply our decisions resound, and just what is the place—and price—of grandeur.
A gothic tale of a declining aristocratic Scottish family, their dilapidated mansion in the Scottish highlands, and the poisonous effects of the secrets and tragedies it holds.
The true history of the Salter family lies at the heart of a web of secrecy and deception that is gradually unravelled... as the family realise that they are trapped in a cyclical pattern of their own creation. —The Times Literary Supplement
A really terrific read... Elegant, well written, genuinely gripping. —Joanne Harris, author ofChocolat
Absolutely searing... we have a major new talent in our midst. —Daily Express
Gillies handles her large cast and clashing version of events with a precision that makes reading this imaginative novel a fascinating process of discovery. —Metro
The prose is elegant and beautiful, and Gillies has a skill for creating both character and a sense of place; Peattie is so vividly describló'
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