In hypnotic and mesmerizing language, Kirsty Gunn explores the dark world of a young girl who has grown up with a mother dependent on storytelling and the oblivion of addiction to cope with the memory of lost love, the girl's father. Raised on deceptive tales of happiness, the younger woman is drawn into and begins to relive the real story of pain, abandonment, and the tyranny of desire. As her life spirals out of control, the tangled yarn of her mother's past begins to unravel, until finally she can come to tell a story that is her own. This luminous and disturbing novel reveals the terrible intimacy of family love and the redemptive power of storytelling.