Cabinets of Curiosities

England, 2009. The time of Michael Jackson's death. Summoned to the remote Lincolnshire village of Bubbleby by the sister of a former college friend, the enigmatic Isabel White, the narrator Sam Whoo travels to her family's home, The Weavers. He feels that he is journeying back in time to a settled England and a way of life far removed from his own nomadic, cosmopolitan existence. He is swiftly disabused of this assumption. The Weavers is a house of secrets, and Sam will come to learn how entwined with the secrets he himself is. With one exception, each member of the family has a cabinet of curiosities. These include collections of fairground freaks and ephemera, teapots, weaponry, train songs, maps and Gothic paraphernalia. However, the novel's real curiosities are the members of the White family themselves, one of whom has a deadly disposition. Cabinets of Curiosities is as much a what's-been-dun as a whodunit. It is also a Condition of England novel. Its vivid characters range from an impressionable eight-year-old girl to a garrulous eighty-seven-year-old man.