I have had a great deal of trouble putting my reaction to this book into words--it's a very plain story that is very complicated; the language it uses appears to be perfectly clear and simple but this clarity and simplicity is the result of great art. To be blunt, this short novel, masquerading as a sort of mystery, could kick any of the clever things that have clawed their way onto the best-seller lists, or into venues like Oprah Winfrey's reading list, in the slats and leave them wheezing and crying because their glitter had been washed off. The Lovely Bones has nothing on the beauties of this book.

One of the most famous sentences Frost wrote describes home as the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in; and the narrator of this story, Rowan Coffey, finds himself, in his first year at university, desperate needing to go back to a place that will take him in when a classmate is murdered. When he gets home, though, his hopes for shelter and succor are shown to be desperately fragile. How far will Rowan go to preserve his shelter?
The answer to that unrolls in what appears, at first, to be a simple ribbon but soon shows itself as complicated as the situation Rowan fled from, and it is far from easy to determine where the various burdens of guilt and complicity should lie. By the time I had finished this book, I wanted to read it all over again, and its impact was not diluted the second time around. The chill of the harsh landscape of northern England had settled in my bones, and the weight of Rowan's experiences and new knowledge was not easily set aside.

This book has only recently been released in the US; Brenchley's more recent books are fantasy novels every bit as complicated and dire as this piece of contemporary fiction. They all appear to be simple at first, with complexities that grow slowly upon you, and are not stories for those who want something just like what they've read before, free from ambiguity and regret.