An extremely sharp, well-written female revenge thriller that looks at trauma and the complicated ways in which it manifests.

In a remote farmhouse in Scotland an artist, Cora Berger, balances precariously in front of a giant painting of a mysterious snowscape. In London, her daughter, Freya, watches faded home movies – searching in these images of Eden, a remote South African farm, for the child who would become her troubled mother. And at a Canadian wolf sanctuary, a young woman named Angel Lamar works with infinite predatory patience to hunt down the men who witnessed the horror that was her childhood.

In a work that is, in turn, introspective and brutal, The Eye of the Beholder interweaves the lives of Cora, her daughter Freya and Angel – three women struggling to gain control of their present even as they unravel the painful truths of a cruel past.

With a mystery – and a crime – at the centre of its tightly woven plot, The Eye of the Beholder defies the constraints of genre to examine the compulsive lure and the danger of the male gaze.

What happens when a woman allows the eye of the beholder to capture her in its thrall? What happens when she resists? What is she to do when she cannot? Examining the allure of the female body in the world of art and in pornography, the impulse to create and the compulsion to destroy, this is a book about the reclaiming of power – and its terrible cost.