This unusual and rather gripping novel begins in a London theatre in 2020, where a once popular and controversial author takes his seat to watch his daughter Sophia’s new play. Within moments he realises – with mounting dread – that what he’s really watching is himself, refracted through her eyes. The production unspools their trip to Sicily ten years earlier, when she was seventeen, a holiday he remembers as sunny and productive, but which she has clearly re-cast in far darker tones. The book loops between past and present – the oppressive heat of that Sicilian summer, heavy with unspoken tensions, and the father now, trapped in his seat, forced into a kind of trial by theatre. His daughter’s words excavate things he had forgotten, or chosen to forget, and the chasm between their versions of events grows ever more uncomfortable. Meanwhile, outside the auditorium, she lunches with her mother – itself a dicey, explosive, engagement - and steels herself for meeting her father later. It is, without doubt, a very middle-class milieu of authors and playwrights which we enter, but the book at least manages to poke fun at itself in this regard. I really enjoyed this book, I particularly liked the way Hamya used the tropes of the psychological thriller – split timelines, alternating perspectives – to tell a smaller, more intimately human, grimly funny, and devastating story. There’s no masked killer or hidden identities here. The monstrous is human in form, induced by ignorance, selfishness, and emotional incapacity. We follow Sophia and her unnamed father in close third person narration until they come together again towards the end of the book. Each encounters Sophia’s mother, also unnamed, in their threads, but we never get a close view of her perspective; we experience her wholly through the others’ filters. The gaps between what is said, what is meant, what is done, and the unintended impact, form the crux of the story. Each of the three is unable to relate to the others, carrying regret for what they could have been together. The biggest question is left for the reader to answer; which of them is the hypocrite?