Winner of the 2002 Somerset Maugham Award

Damien March is a disconsolate journalist working the nightshift at the BBC in London. He hasn't thought of his eccentric uncle for 20 years and so is shocked when he learns that he has inherited his uncle's ramshackle house on an isolated island off the coast of Cape Cod.

Without a relationship compelling enough to keep him in his humdrum life, Damien decides to take off to the Cape.

But his new future means confronting his family's past. And when he discovers a fragment of an unpublished mystery novel, the parallels with his uncle's life quickly become disconcerting and sinister...