A stunning dark, intimate, and affecting book which grabbed and held my attention from the first page.

Recently dead Max haunts the London flat where Hannah his grieving girlfriend still lives. They are both stricken by the loss of what they could have been and the recognition of what they never were.

While Max permeates the flat, trying to make some kind of contact with her, Hannah is dogged by her past, a dark thing of desperation and trauma which she has tried to bury, and which brought her from the Australian bush to this precise place 

The timelines shift between generations and countries exploring Hannah’s secret, and the couple’s shared, pasts, and revealing the monstrous and beautiful complexities of human connection.

We see the harsh realities of trauma and the pernicious coping strategies which can inhibit our ability to move beyond the echoes of our past, or cause us to amplify those echoes. There are horrors, glimpsed fleetingly - like ghosts, no less - and they linger for us, and for the characters, without melodrama. They seep into us. A cold clammy weight, growing heavier as we piece together the fragments of Hannah’s family history.

It’s not an easy comfortable read by any means, and it contains pretty much every trigger you could expect. 

It is dark and strange and it will settle around your shoulders for days after you have finished it. You will marvel at the economy and precision with which Wyld can depict a complex relationship dynamic or a shrouded tension, and make you see and feel it all while keeping so much unseen and unsaid.

Remarkable and brilliant