In the midst of a savage Scottish winter, a man commits an unspeakable crime. A decade after the event, an old acquaintance of the prisoner sifts through the fallout to understand what happened. But as he pieces the story together, and examines it from several perspectives, his words become strained by the pressure to do justice to the survivors. In his struggle to come to terms with the past, he can’t be sure that he isn’t degrading the experiences of people who’ve suffered enough.

Unspeakable emerges from his dilemma as an unsettling exploration of the limits of the moral imagination. Do attempts at sympathy for the victims of tragedies show respect or prey on pain? Can a testimony on behalf of others provide restitution without distorting the truth? In tense, hypnotic prose, this powerful and provocative novel casts doubt on the ethics of the very story it tells, searching for ways to draw a line between what must be spoken aloud and what eludes all speech.