How do you mourn someone you never really knew?

Three siblings – Anna, Gemma and Matthew – will have to work that out quickly. Monday is the day of their gentle, but distant, father’s funeral, and for the first time in a long while they are under one roof with their mother, imperious Yvonne, awaiting the arrival of their aunt Amy, an award-winning poet.

Yet, as the funeral looms, their everyday concerns refuse to diminish: will newly sex-obsessed Gemma work out what she wants from life, beyond her mother’s expectations? Can Anna maintain the fine balance between desire and nonchalance with her not-quite-exclusive boyfriend back in London? Will Amy’s past explode the relationships of the present? And, crucially, will Yvonne pull off her grand, post-funeral family dinner, the solution to what she fears may be an unsolvable problem?

Told from five perspectives, into the wreck worries at the knotty complexities of one family’s bonds, written with Susannah Dickey’s trademark empathy and wit.

Susannah Dickey is a novelist and poet. Her first novel Tennis Lessons was published by Doubleday in 2020, Common Decency followed in 2022. She has published several poetry pamphlets, including I Had Some Very slight Concerns (The Lifeboat Press, 2017), Genuine Human Values (The Lifeboat Press, 2018), Bloodthirsty for Marriage (Bad Betty Press, 2020) and Oh! (The Lifeboat Press, 2022). Her first collection of poetry, ISDAL, was published by Picador in 2023. In 2024 it became the winner of the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize. 

Susannah completed her PhD at Queen's University Belfast in 2023, and received a Publishing Fellowship at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's in 2025. 

A rare talent, and certainly one to watch' SUNDAY TIMES
'One of literature's major new talents' OBSERVER
'One of the funniest and most insightful novelists writing today' NELL FRIZZELL