A story about a working-class couple undergoing a slow investigation of their boarder and sometimes-lover's death, Quin's experimental novel has the potential to be dreary to the point of unreadability. But I found myself laughing in public, amazed at the way the author uses enjambment and dangling modifiers to add brilliant layers to her prose, line breaks that turn otherwise dry language into something almost too smart for its own good. The way Quin conjures claustrophobia, familiarity, and a sense of text being found rather than written--it all upset the way I'll read from here on out.
— Jack P.S has disappeared from Ruth and Leonard's home in Brighton. Suicide is suspected. The couple, who had been spying on their young lodger since before the trouble, begin to pour over her diary, her audio recordings and her movies - only to discover that she had been spying on them with even greater intensity. As this disturbing, highly charged act of reciprocal voyeurism comes to light, and as the couple's fascination with S comes to dominate their already flawed marriage, what emerges is an unnerving and absorbing portrait of the taboos, emotional and sexual, that broke behind the closed doors of 1950s British life.