For the first time in years, Edmund Narraway has returned to his childhood home--for the funeral of his mother. The visit rekindles feelings of affection and nostalgia--but also triggers a resurgence of the tensions that caused him to leave in the first place.

As Edmund once again becomes entangled in his family's web of corrosive secrets, his homecoming tips a precariously balanced dynamic into sudden chaos, in this compelling story of reunion and coming apart from Iris Murdoch, "one of the most significant novelists of her generation" (The Guardian).