After their father’s death, Erik and Inga Davidsen begin sorting through what he’s left behind.

There's the everything of a person, alongside all of the papers, journals, fragments—until a single note surfaces, hinting at a buried act from the 1930s. 

Erik, a psychiatrist adrift after divorce, drifts further—into his father’s writing, into the lives around him, into an almost compulsive attachment with this spectral relationship. Everyone here carries something neurological, psychological, or inherited; no one is untouched, and nothing stays contained.

Secrets aren’t uncovered so much as relocated—absorbed into the present, where they continue to act. Hustvedt builds a novel out of grief, memory, misreading, and the uneasy sense that identity is something assembled from other people’s unfinished lives.

2008 Sceptre (Hodder & Stoughton) paperback edition. Good reading copy. Noticeable creasing to covers and spine, with some edge wear and surface marks. Internally clean and solid, no major markings or inscriptions. Structurally sound.