A remarkable and gripping tale with shades of Jeanette Winterson and JM Coetzee, Sea of Wise Insects's exquisite prose is a delight. Fate has it in for the oddball loner secretary Alice Wolfe. Not only has she lost her dog, Pluto, her husband-to-be, Ralph, and a finger, but she's about to lose her freedom. Her body is covered in scars from accidents over the years, and everyone she’s ever loved has mysteriously disappeared. She claims she’s a magnet for bad luck. But others see her as a brooding misfit with a missing finger, a borderline cutter, a stitched-up freak show. Following the death of her brother's beautiful, superficial fiancee, Veronica, in a sinister car accident on Table Mountain, Alice is arrested. As the trial hurtles towards her, Alice interrogates her past. What could her memories of the macabre Hotel Tisca in London, where she fell in love with her enigmatic ex-fiance Ralph, have to do with Veronica’s death? What is Alice’s family hiding? Where are Ralph and her brother Andrew - and what really happened to her dog Pluto? Do the answers lie in a chilling, badly-written novella, ‘The Sea of Wise Insects’, which Alice is convinced Ralph wrote? Or will Alice’s journey through her warped memory world – an offbeat landscape of betrayal, love, luck, secrets, mutilation and death – really be able to shed any light on her dark past?