Lex picks over the details of how their father – “the rot in my bones” – gradually spirals into a religious mania and begins to curtail his children’s freedoms. Many of the scenes from their childhood are disturbing, though I would say I didn't find it to be gratuitous in the way books like I Know Who You Are and My Absolute Darling were. l’incipit di queste trecentosessanta pagine di tourbillon che Abigail Dean padroneggia con sapiente abilità, accelerando e rallentando, approfondendo e sospendendo, alternando i piani temporali proprio dove conduce l’emozione di quel momento, di quella pagina. But the reality is that happily ever after is impossible and any long-term abuse survivor is always, always going to carry what they lived through. The Last Thing to Burn is one of the best thrillers I have read in years: I consumed it in great gulps, desperate to find out how Thanh Dao’s story played out, and then read it again, more slowly, savouring her courage and her unvanquished sense of self, despite everything.

I know she was trying to explain it to the reader, but she could have found a more believable way to do so. Lex, who narrates, is a successful lawyer who hopes to turn their “house of horrors” experience into a force for good.This book follows a very similar story arc, right down to the siblings on holiday in identical red tee shirts. Yes he was young but he definitely wasn’t innocent and avoided nearly everything the others suffered.

A BFI, BBC Film, Creative Scotland presentation in association with Great Point Media of a Barry Crerar production.British-Nigerian playwright and filmmaker Adura Onashile makes a promising feature-length debut with this study of an intensely bonded mother and daughter resettling in Glasgow.

It is suggested that their mother may have been a victim herself, and that the elder brother Ethan may have shared culpability in some ways, but neither of these potential areas of exploration is actually explored beyond the mere suggestion of it. But Kieran hasn’t come home for years – a choice he made as a teenager had devastating consequences, ones that still echo through his family’s life and the lives of the town’s inhabitants.

There is nothing casual about what happens here, and the victims are the heroes, in the most difficult, compromised ways imaginable. Together with her sister Evie, Lex wants to turn the evil house into a force of good, a space for children and art. This in a way is counter-productive, as while it is an effective way of telling the story and evoking Alexandra’s perspective, it is not engaging in the slightest. As Lex navigates the present her memories of the past provide context for her present day behaviour which is at times confusing and bewildering.

Instead, the mysteries are in the flashbacks, about what happened in the house before Lex’s escape, as it becomes clearer that the reader has not been told some of the things that happened all those years ago.Writing this point makes me feel like a horrible person, but I would like to have had more meat and potatoes and less ketchup and steak sauce.