To the men she matches with online, Poppy is a dream come true. She’s bright, bubbly and always knows the right bar to meet at. She only has one flaw: she’s dead, and therefore guaranteed to ghost them. Hiding behind her profile are Gertie and Tabitha, eerily co-dependent stepsisters and virtuosic morticians familiar with all it takes to give a dead body the appearance of life. Their weeks are spent painting colour onto sunken cheeks, filling veins with formaldehyde and sewing flesh back into pleasing shapes before heading out on a Friday night and performing a different sort of substitution at the bar. They find a man who’s been left waiting for a corpse and take him home instead. All it takes is a moment’s distraction and a pill slipped into a drink and the men become powerless in their arms, soon to awaken in bed – unviolated, but unsettled nonetheless.

Is this grim routine some collective revenge for male violence, a bizarre simulacrum of romance, or something stranger still? If there are answers to be found, they lie deep behind Gertie and Tabitha’s facade of functionality, in the failed relationships from beneath whose shadows they struggle to escape and in the steadily growing cracks threatening their carefully measured lives.

Chloe Wilson’s debut novel is a playfully dark tale of appearances and entitlement told from the perspective of two sisters so close they literally share a single narratorial voice. Although their motivations often seem inscrutable, Wilson expertly immerses you in their world of sensation, where sights, sounds and smells only exist at the extremes of pleasure and disgust. In such a world, it seems only natural that the ordinary and forgettable should be overlooked. Supposedly ordinary and forgettable themselves, Gertie and Tabitha are heroes for anyone accustomed to the scraps of life and eager to bite for something bigger.