Sylvie feels truly alive only during therapy—she’s in love with her therapist. Every session is electric, every moment apart an ache she measures down to the minute. Whether these feelings stem from “erotic transference,” as her therapist gently suggests, or from a desperate need for connection, Sylvie can’t quite untangle – but her dependence is high.

Outside therapy, Sylvie’s world is modest but steady: her job as a veterinary nurse, her little dog Curtains, and a new friendship with Chloe, someone she stumbled across on the beach.

When the therapist delivers some devastating news Sylvie’s tightly bound life starts to buckle, and she faces a choice: stay safely wrapped in fear, or lean with courage into the messy, thrilling possibilities.

I loved the humanity, wit, and perspicacity of this book. Sylvie has a troubled past, and the scene could be set for a dark tale of obsession (as in Emma Van Straaten’s brilliant The Immaculate Body), but Faith takes us elsewhere. Sylvie understands her feelings have a fantastical element, and that the fantasy brings a magic to her life which she feels it otherwise lacks. In recognising the folly of her situation Sylvie finds the humour and absurdity in it, appreciating how it must look from the outside. With the therapist’s help she can relate it to previous patterns in her life and start to pick at the locks which impede her.

Sylvie is such a winning character, braver, more resilient, and more capable than she thinks, and we can see how much she has to give, and how much she wants to give it. Faith’s writing has a wonderfully buoyant quality, communicating Sylvie’s sense of otherness and dislocation with crisp, moving, and striking lucidity.

This is a hugely engaging and enjoyable book and will strike a note with anyone who feels they never got life’s rulebook and have been blundering around with ill-informed but benevolent intentions ever since.