Alexander Cleave has never been able to rid himself of the feeling that he is in 'a perpetual state of being watched' - even when alone. So he become an actor, and successfully performed his way through life until suddenly, at the peak of his career, he corpsed in the middle of the last act and staggered off stage, never to return.

Self-banished to his childhood home and cut off from his wife, Cleave begins to unravel the past and disinter his own identity. But his attempt to retire, to sift and discard the accumulated clutter of half a century of existence, is undermined by the house itself, brimming with lives, both ghostly and undeniably, robustly human. Memory constantly displaces Cleave's attention to the small, delicate details of the present. So too does his anxiety about the future, and the thought of his beloved but troubled daughter, Cass, tugging away at him like an undertow.

This humane and beautifully written story tells the tragic tale of a man, intelligent, preposterous and vulnerable, who in attempting to bring the performance to a close, finds himself travelling inevitably towards a devastating denouement.