The Book of Guilt

Catherine Chidgey's The Book of Guilt imagines a Britain where the Second World War ended in a 1943 stalemate, leaving British scientists with access to Nazi genetic research they folded into a state program of their own. By 1979, thirteen-year-old triplets William, Lawrence and Vincent are among the last children raised at Sycamore Homes, a government institution founded in 1944 and run by three women the boys call their "mothers," sealed off from the outside world.

The novel alternates between Vincent's account of life inside the home, Nancy — a girl kept confined to a house she is never allowed to leave — and the Minister of Loneliness, the official tasked with winding the human-engineering scheme down for budgetary reasons. When girls from a sister institution arrive and suggest that the "medicine" the children are given causes their illnesses rather than curing them, the true purpose of the program starts to surface.

As the government moves to close the scheme entirely, Vincent and the Minister each come to suspect that the children's lives, not just the program's funding, are what is really being wound up — building to what reviewers have called a devastating denouement and an unsettling morality tale about state-sponsored experimentation and who is allowed to matter.