Swift's Waterland soaks into McEwan's Cement Garden in this shocking and intense debut. Incest, madness & romance in the peat. Can an incestuous relationship ever be a happy one? Steeped in an unearthly and unsettling fenland landscape, relationships like that between Victor and his teen sister tend to mist up the perspectives of the 'normal'. A decade on, Victor arrives in Paris to write a book about Kerouac. 'All he possessed was his past, a writer's greatest treasure. While not wanting to repudiate it, he aspired to the grandeur of loss.' And it is there, in the security and oppressiveness of his childhood, in the lonely fens of Groningen, that Victor's dark treasure lies -- an oppresiveness symbolized by the alcoholism of his father -- and of his incestuous love for his younger sister Lisa. From the no-man's-land between sea and soil in north-east Holland comes an outstanding book from an author who promises to be one of the first European literary stars of the new century. Steamy, sensuous, atmospheric and ripe with longing and loneliness.