For some time now, I have been plagued, perhaps blessed, by dreams of rivers and seas, dreams of water. Just days after Albert James writes these lines to his son, John, in London, he is dead. Abandoning a pretty girlfriend and the lab where he is completing his PhD, John flies to Delhi to join his mother in mourning.

The gift of tongues, prophecy exorcism... what might such concepts mean in a complacent backwater of North London? For Richard Bowen, adolescence becomes a nightmare when his parents join the charismatic movement and find a devil in his brother.