“Before I knew what I was, I lived with my brothers in a grand old house in the heart of the New Forest.” So begins Catherine Chidgey’s quietly devastating novel, The Book of Guilt, a haunting blend of psychological fable, gothic parable, and slow-burn thriller.
Set in England in 1979, it tells the story of Vincent, Laurence and William, identical triplets raised under the Sycamore Scheme, a secretive government project housed in an isolated care home.
At first, there is something of a sleepy fairy tale in the way the boys are raised in isolation, their dreams reaching seaward, “a gentle hushing as constant as the hushing of our own breaths, our own blood”.
Overseeing them are three matriarchs, Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night, who monitor every detail of the boys’ lives. Dreams are catalogued in The Book of Dreams, lessons in The Book of Knowledge and every offence in The Book of Guilt.
But beneath the routine, something feels wrong. This is not parenting, it is programming. The strangeness seeps in slowly, with devastating effect. The boys begin to question why their meals are laced with medicine or why their reading is confined to dusty encyclopedias. “We didn’t know the name of our sickness, and its symptoms varied from month to month and boy to boy; we just called it the Bug.”
They are promised a reward, a place in the Big House by the sea in Margate, a paradise of endless play. Interwoven with their story is that of 13-year-old Nancy, kept inside by her overprotective parents in Exeter. Her growing claustrophobia mirrors the boys’ captivity. Meanwhile, the Minister of Loneliness leads a government effort to dismantle the Sycamore Homes.
Chidgey writes with surgical precision and emotional weight. Like Never Let Me Go, it gradually unveils a reality that feels disturbingly plausible. The speculative premise, that children are “copies” raised for obedience and discarded at signs of deviance, becomes a chilling metaphor for institutional control.
The Book of Guilt is a singular story that lingers, and burrows into the darker corners of childhood, surveillance, and what it means to truly see, or be seen. The result is a novel of conscience and consequence: quietly devastating, fiercely intelligent and unforgettable.
