The Beached Ones is a ghost story that breaks a lot of rules, plays with your expectations and keeps surprising you. Three intertwining love stories weave through the whole book – Daniel’s love for his decade-younger brother, his love for a fragile, troubled girl, and his love of motorcycles. He would die for any of them. And he does.

It’s a book that tosses the reader from one emotion to another. Outrage and sadness at Daniel’s troubled upbringing, unravelling via flashbacks throughout the book. Bewilderment as we see a world between worlds through his eyes. Grief and sadness at some of the decisions that the characters have to take, frustration, curiosity, fear…. It’s also a book that made me ask existential questions - about what it is to be alive or dead, to have agency, to be visible, to be known. I found myself thinking about other invisibilities – of age and class and social position – and of the liminal worlds inhabited by people who are discounted. I found myself thinking about what it is to love someone, when you can’t see them, touch them, be with them. And about what a small thing life is, what a wafer thin boundary there is between existence and non-existence.

Issues of suicide figure at various points in this story, and this isn't a book to read if you are battling those issues in your own life or in relation to someone you love. But all the same, it made me think about the power involved in an act of self-extinction, the terrifying energy unleashed by even the loneliest of suicides.

The book is exquisitely plotted. There are twists throughout, and I didn’t see them coming. Events and relationships cross in unexpected ways that always make absolute sense as one reaches their conjunction. Nothing feels forced in this story, despite the labyrinthine contortions that it actually accomplishes.

This is a truly beautiful book.