Poet Conor O’Callaghan’s debut novel Nothing on Earth is one of the most compelling books released this year.

On a swelteringly hot day in August, a twelve year old girl knocks on the door of a man’s house. He is a priest and the book’s narrator. The girl is strangely dressed with pen marks all over her arm. Her father, she says, has “gone too.” The girl has been living on a ghost estate with her parents and aunt. The mother and her sister have disappeared, and now her father has as well.

Nothing on Earth is a gothic novel, although the ghost estate and the unceasing summer heat are at odds with the general tropes of the genre.