With an abandoned degree behind her and a 30th birthday approaching, amateur writer Bonnie Falls moves out of her parents' home into a nearby flat. Her landlady, Sylvia Slythe, takes an interest in Bonnie, encouraging her to finish one of her stories, in which a young woman moves to the seaside, where she comes under strange influences.

As summer approaches, Sylvia suggests to Bonnie that, as neither of them has anyone else to go on holiday with, they should go away together - to the seaside, perhaps.

The new novel from the author of the Man Booker-short-listed The Lighthouse is a tense and moreish confection of semiotics, suggestibility and creative writing with real psychological depth and, in Bonnie Falls and Sylvia Slythe, two unforgettable characters.

Alison Moore's first novel, The Lighthouse, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award (New Writer of the Year) and won the McKitterick Prize. Both The Lighthouse and her second novel, He Wants, were Observer books of the year. Her shorter fiction has been included in Best British Short Stories and Best British Horror anthologies, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra and collected in The Pre-War House and Other Stories.

Born in Manchester in 1971, she lives near Nottingham with her husband, Dan, and son, Arthur.