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. Roehm enters their lives and begins a slow dance of courtship and seduction. Daily life becomes unstable, duplicitous. But who is he really - this huge, sinister, irresistible man with no clear past? Toby decides he must find out, and the trail he follows will ultimately transform his life. 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. This is an as new, unread copy. Print run reads 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2, whatever that means.

Fiction