Candida and Leo have been close friends since university, living together but loving separately. When Candida dies, she leaves her five-year-old daughert, Pagan, in Leo's care. Candida's adoptive parents are horrified. Refusing to accept that a gay man is a suitable person to bring up a child, they challenge Leo's guardianship in court. As Leo fights for his and Pagan's rights, he begins to discover the truth about Candida, the cause of her estrangement from her adoptive parents, the identity of her natural mohter and the reasons for her refusal to name Pagan's father. It should be required reading wherever the nuclear family is smallmindedly lauded as the one true ideal. Unputdownable. The Times
A subtle and complex reflection on the wider nature of love and attachment. Sunday Telegraph
A moving novel about the survival of a modern family in the grip of death and the dead hand of convention. New Yorker
Arditti writes exactly like Dickens. He demands participation from the reader in an era of detachment. Scotland on Sunday
The questions Arditti tackles are burning and central. I honestly couldn't put the book down. Literary Review