“One hot summer day, Michael Salter, nineteen-year-old scion of a posh Highland family, disappears. When his childlike aunt claims she drowned him during a fight, the family close ranks. No police. No memorial service. No titbits for village gossips. A decade of deceit begins.” — Financial Times

The Salter family orbits around Peattie House, their crumbling Scottish estate filled with threadbare furniture, patrician memories, and all the secrets that go with them. While they are gathered for their grandmother's seventieth birthday, someone breaks the silence. The web begins to unravel. But what is the white lie? How many others are built upon it? How many lives have been changed because of it? Only one person knows the whole truth. From beyond the grave, Michael loops back into the past until we see, beyond perception and memory, how deeply our decisions resound, and just what is the place, and price, of grandeur.

Andrea Gillies brings us inside a big house and a great family, with an elegantly written novel of eccentric characters, twists and turns and redirects, and shocking revelations.