A sultry August in Sicily in 1999 provides the initial setting for Marina Kemp’s powerfully compelling second novel. The court of the revered novelist and patriarch Don Travers – his four children; his silent, apparently surrendered wife Lydia; and a revolving guestlist of the great and good, the influential, the useful and the up-and-coming – is in situ at Il Frantoio, the rambling villa the family takes every summer.
At 10 years old, the youngest Travers daughter, Nemony – feeling left out, as youngest children often do – is our first and principal narrator. The second is a young writer, Zoe Goodison, whose first novel has recently been published to high praise. She has been brought into Il Frantoio’s charmed circle by Don, whose interest in her may or may not be sexual. Zoe is alienated from her background, in a toxic relationship, ill-at-ease, prickly, proud and insomniac. Like Nemony, she inhabits the storyteller’s position on the edge of things.
