The Family Upstairs

Libby Jones turns twenty-five and inherits a derelict mansion on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea from parents she never knew existed. The inheritance comes with a police file: three adults found dead inside in what investigators ruled a suicide pact, a ten-month-old baby left alive and well in her crib, and two older children who disappeared and were never found.

The novel moves between Libby and Lucy in the present, tracing what each of them is willing to risk to learn the truth, and Henry's account of his childhood in that same house in the late 1980s, as an outsider named David gradually installs himself in the family home and reshapes the household around him.

It is a story about domestic control taking hold in plain sight, told across two timelines that meet at the same address.