When Adam Woods takes a job in Venice as the assistant to the reclusive writer Gordon Crace, he does not expect that he will end up writing his biography. Nor does he expect the uncanny similarity between himself and Crace's former tenant, who died in mysterious circumstances decades earlier. But when his desire to write the book of Crace's life becomes an obsession that takes Adam from the swampy canals of Venice to the hallowed halls of a great English public school, we get the uncomfortable sense that Adam isn't all we think he is...An unsettling and deeply atmospheric thriller from the author of a critically acclaimed biography of Patricia Highsmith, Andrew Wilson destabilises our notions of authorship, identity and moral authority.