fiction

Four teenagers are sent ahead to their holiday cottage in the south of France for the summer. Luke, Connor, Thea and Violet share a father, but have only lately come to know about one another. Languid days by the pool and the lake have an undercurrent of tension as sibling frictions and personal upsets leave them brooding. In the meantime, animals and plants begin to behave in uncanny self-destructive ways and the weather is subtly wrong. Then one night Violet sees a plane fall from the sky. Sporadic news updates show the same footage of empty streets in the capital cities, and they lose contact with parents, friends and neighbours. The siblings adapt to their new isolation as they all try to take care of one another during the strange overcast days, doubtfully looting the empty houses and stockpiling books in the French only Thea can translate. For a while, they survive – but all are altered. Luke, the eldest, finds himself fraying under the pressure of his caretaking role. Connor begins to hear a drone without a source. Thea’s panic attacks and Violet’s paranoia gather steam and the world gets stranger.

Its a slow build novel, reminding me of How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff with some elements in common with Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. There’s an undercurrent of desire gone toxic, overripe yearning, disrupted sexuality. Private traumas metastasize in the greater upheaval and nothing will endure unchanged.