Narrator Noah Gilmore is researching the biography of William Belios, an ex-missionary and once famous photographer, and spends a week in his household at Oughterard, Co. Galway.

Belios is Gilmore's nemesis, his quarry, mirroring his own desires and uncertainties, as he determines to unearth family secrets: the dead wife buried in Africa and the blighted lives of three grown-up children.

The eldest Medbh, an erotic illustrator, guides Gilmore down the labyrinth. Their futures demand an erasure of a troubled past as its layers are unpeeled and its perverse roots become exposed.

This haunting tale concerns the unravelling of private lives; it offers a world in which the undertow of the imagination makes the reader complicit in its workings. Belios is a startlingly mature and exciting début.