ABOUT
THE BOOK

Children understand tragedy in a way adults are unable to: atom by atom. Untainted by a hundred other learned horrors, they are haunted for the appropriate length of time. They ask a thousand unanswerable questions. The story stays with them; they dream of it.
Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted student, Lucien. As her sexual life is awakened by the father in scenes of escalating eroticism, the guilt she feels towards the son is compounded. Meanwhile, Veronica, her lover’s wife, has just published Murder at Black Swan Point, a true crime account of the brutal slaying of a young adulteress in a nearby town twenty years earlier. When Lucien begins to display violent images in his crayon sketches, Kate wonders how well he understands his mother’s grisly work, and why he’s been exposed to it.
Suspecting Veronica’s account of the Black Swan Point murder to be incorrect, and increasingly obsessed by the tale of a woman who wreaks vengeance on her husband’s young lover, Kate begins to imagine her own version of the story, written for children. Compelled by the world of her nine-year-old students, she’s a misfit among their parents; her involvement with Lucien’s father only serves to further alienate her from the adult world. Kate becomes fixated on the crime of passion that occurred years earlier, less and less aware of her own reputation in the present, as she risks dooming herself to the same fate.