Toby Hawk is a solitary boy in a family of Amazons. His mother, only
fifteen years older than him, is a painter on the brink of commercial
success. His great-aunt is a wealthy textile designer; her partner,
Liberty, a barrister. Meanwhile, eighteen-year-old Toby's world remains a
small, closed round of school, domesticity and surfing the Net at
night. But everything changes when his mother takes up with a
fascinating but enigmatic scientist, Roehm. Patricia Duncker's gripping
novel is a disturbing tale of Oedipal passion. It is also an eerie
psychological ghost story in the European tradition, whose sources -
Freud, Faust and Frankenstein - haunt the pages.