Book excerpt: From the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls 'Gripping in the best, most exquisite sense of the word' Mail on Sunday 'Utterly compelling... She is a novelist who probes deep, revealing what people prefer to keep hidden' Scotsman 'Extraordinary... Without question the best novel I have read this year' Daily Mail 'Brilliant touches of observation, an unfailing ear for dialogue... This is a novel that doesn't allow you to miss a sentence' New York Times Book Review At 101 years old, Geordie, a proud Somme veteran, lingers painfully through the days before his death. His grandson Nick is anguished to see this once-resilient man haunted by the ghosts of the trenches and the horror surrounding his brother's death. But in Nick's family home the dark pressures of the past also encroach on the present. As he and his wife Fran try to unite their uneasy family of step- and half-siblings, the discovery of a sinister Victorian drawing reveals the murderous history of their house and casts a violent shadow on their lives...