A "powerful image of innocence betrayed, of measureless evil oozing quietly from regulated, unimpeachable convention" - LJ.

"My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks: I had better go to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away

A series of loosely connected autobiographical stories, they describe the disturbing relationship between a mother and her adolescent son as she moves from love