The day after Peter Leverett met his old friend Mason Flagg in Italy, Mason was found dead. The hours leading up to his death were a nightmare for Peter - both in their violence and in their maddening unreality.

Frustrated author Herman Orff takes up the offer of a cure for writer's block and plunges into a semi-dreamland inhabited by a bizarre combination of characters from myth and reality: the talking head of Orpheus, the young girl of Vermeer's famous portrait, and a frequency of Medusas.

On a Monday night in October in a seaside town in Suffolk, a woman is brutally murdered. She was not an obvious victim. She just wasn't, thinks her grieving, bewildered friend Tess, the type to have something happen to her. As the police go about their routine investigation, Tess' world of nappies, school runs and baked beans begin to unravel.

Passionately determined to write his novel whilst running College Sunrise, a finishing school for both sexes and mixed nationalities, Rowland Mahler is assisted by his wife, Nina Parker. This term there is a new star pupil - Chris, seventeen, also determined to write his masterpiece.

Marcelo inhabits a world peopled by characters in literature. He once wrote a novel about the impossibility of love, but since then he has written nothing and a nervous breakdown has meant that he has been unable to put pen to paper.

The mesmerising new novel from the acclaimed author of THE CLEARING - 'An extraordinary novel, one of the best I've read in years' Annie Proulx