It begins on an orange afternoon, cool but ruminant, close to Halloween. Sunny, only four years old, looks up from the terrarium-sized tub of toys in the living room and asks, 'Mama, do you remember when I died?'Over the course of the next strange, strained year, Sunny will refer repeatedly to her previous lives, and how they ended.Her parents, Lena and Odhran - who rushed headfirst into family life after an accidental pregnancy and a hasty registry office wedding - are left desperate for answers.Is their child suffering from disassociation, a psychological disorder, or something more? Has she been contaminated by their own haunted histories - by Lena's experiences as an indie musician in the era of sleaze, by a shady legacy of madness in Odhran's family? Can we ever really protect our children? What if we can't?
Niamh Campbell is the author of This Happy (2020) and We Were Young (2022). She has won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
Sometimes it is worth stating things plainly: this is a great novel by a great novelist . . . Deeply wise, deeply humane, deeply stylish and deeply moving
