An elegant woman with a broken arm stands before a great gateway. Accompanied by two young children, Olivia has left a violent marriage and returned to her childhood home, an austere chateau surrounded by formal gardens. Haunted by unspoken past events, she considers herself to be already ‘murdered’ – dead before dying. At the same time as this unannounced homecoming another couple are expected at the chateau: her brother Marcus and his wife Sophie are due back from the hospital with their newborn baby. To the dismay of the household, nothing goes to plan. In this world of exquisite artifice and control everyone bears towards breaking . Delicately poetic and richly imagined, Julia Leigh’s new novella is both strange and estranged – a mesmerising vision of a family in extremis.