Book excerpt: The stunning new novel about silenced female voices, family secrets and dangerous truths from the author of The Accident Season. 'Exquisite . . . This is a book to hold tightly to your chest' Irish Times 'Lyrical . . . Compelling' Guardian 'Beautiful, visceral . . . A primal scream' Louise O'Neill 'Uncompromising, raw, devastating' Publishers Weekly 'I am in absolute awe of it' Melinda Salisbury On Deena's seventeenth birthday, the day she finally comes out to her family, her wild and mysterious sister Mandy is seen leaping from a cliff. The family is heartbroken, but not surprised. The women of the Rys family have always been troubled - 'bad apples', their father calls them - and Mandy is the baddest of them all. But then Deena starts to receive the letters. Letters from Mandy, claiming that their family's blighted history is not just bad luck or bad decisions, but a curse, handed down to the Rys women through the generations. Mandy has gone in search of the curse's roots, and now Deena must begin a desperate cross-country hunt for her sister, guided only by the letters that mysteriously appear in each new place. What Deena finds will heal their family's rotten past - or rip it apart forever.