Narrator Noah Gilmore is researching the biography of William Belios, an ex-missionary and once-famous photographer, and spends a week in his household at Oughterard, Co. Galway. Belios is Gilmore's nemesis, his quarry, mirroring his own desires and uncertainties, as he determines to unearth family secrets: the dead wife buried in Africa and the blighted lives of three grown-up children. The eldest, Medb, an erotic illustrator, guides Gilmore down the labyrinth. Their futures demand an erasure of a troubled past as its layers are unpeeled and the perverse roots of its origins become exposed. This hauntingly well-written tale finds fulfilled desires in the unravelling of private lives; it partakes of Patrick McGrath in its gothic pyschological realism, and of Balthus in its painterly vision. Belios offers a world in which the undertow of the imagination makes the reader complicit in its workings. A startlingly mature and exciting debut.