A story about love in later life going wrong and the pull of the past. If your ancestral story included Nietsche, his lover and her supposed acquaintance with Virginia Woolf that's a challenge; if you’re an authority on Nietsche and your lover is studying Woolf expect a tangle. Throw in a house in the woods, a farmhouse, and another house in Wales, full of people overcome by Celtic gloom, and you'll have an idea of how strange this book is.