William Deppling is a man who likes to examine his own motivations and those of others. A former university lecturer, he has now embraced an obscure religious creed and become a guru figure to a group of young people. William's brother, Leonard, comes to stay after taking a sabbatical to nurse their dying father. Leonard has never understood what drives William, but the passage of years has made him more open to trying, and he accepts William's invitation to move in for a while. Harvey's writing in this, her second novel (after her Booker-longlisted debut, The Wilderness), is evocative and frequently luminous but frustratingly impressionistic in places. She takes a long while to shape and shade the two brothers, and too much space is taken up with the batting back and forth of philosophical opinions. Yet while this book doesn't reach the heights of its predecessor, there's still something compelling in the way Harvey resists the easy and the obvious. The result is a novel of both depth and defiance.