ABOUT
THE BOOK

Clever, precocious Ellen is the only one of the four closely knit Van Bemmel children who dreads the coming of a new baby. What if the curse she cast on her unborn sister should come true? When, on the morning of Ellen’s twelfth birthday, her three-year old brother has a shocking accident, it seems a premonition of the horror that will infiltrate their happy if eccentric household, an unspeakable disaster, which even Ellen, dubbed by her father ‘the cement of the family’, is powerless to prevent. Twenty-five years later, a pregnant Ellen returns to the family home. Camping out in bare rooms, while confined to bed by a threatened miscarriage, she is haunted by the increasingly demanding voices of her dead family. Finally, leafing through an old photograph album, she finds the courage to face the past.