Notes on a Breakdown: Atlantic Books

Why did Mary Wade die in a house fire on St Jude's Grove? Her carer, a young woman new to the profession, might know the answer. Her account reveals a patient struggling with spiralling mental illness, ghosts from the past and an increasingly hostile relationship with the downstairs neighbour - a novelist who writes violent fiction.

But as the carer tells her side of the story, how she overcame her own difficult circumstances to take the job in the first place, how she tried to protect her ward from the novelist's threats, she begins to fall under increasing suspicion. Was she caring for Mary...or was she only caring for herself?