A savagely funny and perceptive novel about a washed-up writer and the havoc he has wrought, comparable in its piercing wit to the Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn.

'Blackly comic . . . crisply plotted and filled with pleasurably sharp observations' Guardian

They were colour-supplement darlings of the 1980s: Patrick, the sexy, ferocious young playwright, scourge of an enthralled establishment; and Sara, who abandoned her two children to fulfil her destiny as Patrick's beautiful, devoted wife and muse.

Thirty-five years later, Sara's death leaves Patrick alone in their crumbling house in Cornwall, with his whisky, his writer's block and his undimmed rage against the world. But bereavement is no respecter of life's estrangements, and Sara's children, Louise and Nigel, are now adults with memories, questions and agendas of their own. What was their mother really like? Why did she leave them? What has she left them? And how can Patrick carry on without the love of his life?

'An uncomfortable but brilliantly acute reading of grief, self-interest and the persistence of old wounds' Financial Times

'Coe's a fearless writer, not afraid to linger in the murky, messy corners of her characters' lives' Independent

Brims over with trenchant observation, emotional truth and bitter wit