Rachel, a hyper-graphic, hyper-lexic South African expat who is obsessed with The Diary of Anne Frank, is the youngest of four van Hout daughters whose father Hans, a Dutch-South African accounting professor, moved his family to Newfoundland to make a new start.

When Wade, a young writer, meets and falls in love with Rachel, he learns that nothing in the world of the van Houts is what it seems, and that Rachel’s obsessions have deeper and more disturbing roots than he could
ever have imagined. Each of the four beautiful, dutiful daughters is, in her distinctive way, a wounded soul. The oldest, Gloria, is a hyper-sexual exhibitionist (or is she?) who, by the age of 28, has been married five times. Carmen is addicted to every drug her Afrikaans drug pusher husband Fritz can lay his hands on. Sardonic and self-deprecating Bethany, aka Deathany, is fighting a losing battle with anorexia. And then there is Rachel, who reads and writes obsessively, diarizing her days in a secret language of her own invention.

Set in Newfoundland, apartheid era South Africa, wartime Amsterdam, and two concentration camps this is an intricately woven and propulsive novel that chronicles the unmasking of a mythomaniacal family and the sisters’ fight for love and their very lives. Informed by real events, it is a real tour de force.