The Apartment

Mark and Steph live in Cape Town with their young daughter, and their life is a relatively happy one until armed men in balaclavas break into their home. Neither is physically hurt. Both are left traumatized, unable to settle back into normal life and afraid all the time.

A friend suggests a holiday abroad through a popular house swapping website. A genial, artistic couple in Paris offer a charming apartment and would like to spend time in Cape Town. The photographs are bright and idyllic, and the promise of a romantic getaway is hard to resist.

On arrival, Mark and Steph quickly see that the apartment is not what was advertised. Their holiday turns violent, and the strain on the marriage deepens. Dark secrets from Mark's past begin to surface.

The book is a psychological thriller with horror running through it, told from two narrators: Mark and Steph. It follows a marriage coming apart after a real trauma, and the tension is intimate and unsettling rather than sprawling. The question that drives it is how much of the couple's fear comes from Paris and how much they carried there from Cape Town.