Where the Light Falls could be described as a literary thriller – a detective story of the psyche. The book is replete with flawed characters, among them Andrew’s new child-subject, Phoebe, whose damaged smile will ‘always suggest some inner grief’. Implicated in Kirsten’s fate by perceived guilt, Andrew questions his own remove from the world, ‘so definite it might have run along a perforated seam’, and the instinct towards silence. Imagery suggests an incremental understanding of specific harm: a ‘delicate teapot the colour of crushed bones’; a cold house with carpet ‘the colour of crushed eggshells’.

Shirm writes with an artist’s eye: composition and focus deftly delineate the narrative; lighting is refracted through Andrew’s subjectivity, slowly clarifying the opaque and illuminating the ‘terrible’ dark. Metaphors are particular and often exquisite – a reaching for subtle precision: ‘He felt something in his throat each time he swallowed, like a piece of broken china lodged where his Adam’s apple should have been.’

Is Andrew’s photography a way of further distancing life? Is it a protest against silence, a language that is honest – even beautiful? We wrestle with Andrew’s motivations; we want to understand them better; we are brought to question the relationship between art and life, and whether each might successfully nurture the other.