A story of strange loves and self-deception. Recently expelled from boarding school, 14-year-old Vanessa watches as her autocratic, glamorous mother unravels. Her friend Alan McAlpine offers an impossible comfort, one that she cannot accept. Over the course of four years in the Southern Highlands of Scotland, she tells a tale of desire and loss, power and devotion. But nothing is what it seems, and the world Vanessa has built for herself is as treacherous as glass: fragile, filled with half-truths and reflections. Vanessa's two sisters tumble around her: cocksure Lucy moving confidently away, odd little Bryony sinking deeper into the walls until she almost disappears. A skeleton key with which, perhaps, to unlock the truth. In a voice as bare and beautiful as the landscape, the darker byways of the human heart are hauntingly lit even as the glass house splinters and cracks.