Five months after Mel told her husband to leave, a ghost moved in upstairs. A young man who reminds her, with eerie intensity, of a past lover, someone who changed Mel’s life and then vanished. When the man’s travelling girlfriend joins him, Mel’s obsession with the couple upstairs builds and the boundaries between the two homes begin to blur, with devastating consequences.

The Couple Upstairs is about one strange summer of dazzling, curdling infatuation. Writing with both a light touch and vivid intensity, Holly Wainwright explores love, regret, whether you can stop history repeating, and whether or not you should.