Helena McEwen writes about an imagined childhood spent in a Scottish mansion with a dark nostalgia. Her debut novel, The Big House, is full of moments of extreme beauty, undercut with emotions of fear and sadness. She has an artist's eye for the look of a thing, for the still moment in nature when chaos rages in the heart. And there is chaos aplenty in this melancholy recollection.

The narrator, Elizabeth, now an adult, has returned to the house to oversee its sale. She is still reeling from the suicide of her brother James and the death of her sister Kitty: "I can feel where they have gone. It is a singing place full of light. It dazzles me. I long for the sweetness of it ... Oh no, I am not sad that they have gone. I am sad that they have gone without me."

These thoughts plunge her into the past, where big dinners and "sparkling dresses" grace the rooms, where "tall men stand in groups, wearing shooting socks of beautiful colours, deep green, rust, burgundy and pale morning sky blue", where there are glorious egg hunts and egg-rolling competitions. But there is a monster in the household and it keeps swallowing them up. The mansion is falling apart, burdened by death duties and debts, the father is drunk and depressed, the mother's voice has a "raw, red streak in it."

The characters emotions and relationships are poignantly observed, acute with memory and loss: "I am naked as the branches without her." The sad and sombre in this book are balanced with glimmers of light and humour, with the spare elegance of poetry. --Eithne Farry