The Behaviour of Moths - Couverture rigide

From her lookout on the first floor, Ginny watches and waits for her younger sister to return to the crumbling mansion that was once their idyllic childhood home. Vivien has not set foot in the house since she left, forty-seven years ago; Ginny, the reclusive moth expert, has rarely ventured out. She has been selling off the family furniture over the years, gradually shutting each wing of the house and retreating into the precise routines that define her days. Only the attic remains untouched. There, collected over several generations, the walls are lined with pinned and preserved moths - Bordered Beauties and Rusty Waves, Feathered Footmen and Great Brocades, the Gothic and the Stranger... Now that Vivien is coming home, long forgotten memories are stirred up and the secrets that have separated the sisters threaten to disrupt much more than Ginny's carefully ordered world. Told through Ginny's unforgettable voice, this brilliant debut novel tells us what families are capable of doing to each other - especially in the name of love.

I found listening to it enthralling as well as deeply unsettling... thanks to Sandra Duncan's performance. Her brittle, Cheltenham vowels are perfectly matched to the character of the evasive and deluded narrator. [With] the utterly brilliant matching of narrator to text... we feel we are listening to Ginny herself. --Christina Hardyment, The Times

Layers of increasingly disturbing family secrets are gradually revealed in this beguiling and chilling story with a brilliant narration. --Rachel Redford, The Observer

Adams succeeds in carefully building up an atmosphere of penumbral suspense, creeping towards a tense climax. --The Literary Review