The First House

From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Burnt Sugar comes a gripping psychodrama of unravelling and rebirth.

A woman's husband walks into their bedroom one evening and tells her that he wants a divorce. She is stunned. They have always had a happy marriage, an almost perfect marriage. In the following days, marooned with two young daughters in a hostile suburb, the woman starts coming apart.

As she sifts through the ruins of a shared life, she begins to notice the warning signs which she chose not to see the first time around. She wanders deep into her own mind, where marital scenes intermingle with the old myths of headless women and vengeful goddesses. Over the course of a single summer, she is splitting like an insect in its chrysalis, liquifying and reforming, stretching her new antennae toward the light.

Stiletto-sharp and darkly hypnotic, this is a novel about unhappy families - about the bloody battlefield of the home and the enduring threat posed by those closest to us.