Guest review by Laura Parker: LAND BENEATH THE WAVES by Nic Wilson

"At one level, this is the story of how the natural world entranced, comforted and sustained her as she developed her expert eye ... there is a lot to learn and enjoy in her observations, and in her intense feeling for the land."

Laura Parker is the author of no books (yet), but she is working on one about drystone walls, and has written a growing collection of articles published by Country Life magazine. Her work covers animals and the art and history of the countryside. She has also been published in Little Toller’s The Clearing, an online journal in which writers explore and celebrate the landscape we live in, as well as in Scottish Field and Scottish daily The Courier. Find out more on Laura's website.

As one might expect from a Guardian Country Diarist, nature runs through this book like the chalk bedrock that unrolls beneath Nic Wilson’s adopted home territory of Hertfordshire. Despite its bold opening statement: ‘I am not a memoirist’, what ensues, initially, are some delicate childhood recollections of birding with her father and being introduced to nature close up: moths, rosebay willowherb, birds’ nests. At one level, this is the story of how the natural world entranced, comforted and sustained her as she developed her expert eye. Trained as a teacher, Nic is a natural educator and there is a lot to learn and enjoy in her observations, and in her intense feeling for the land. There is beautiful, tangible writing: ‘Oak bark knuckles my back, its touch reassuringly solid.’

But Nic’s past – and her present – is clouded with pain, both mental and physical. Some stems from the experience of her mother, struggling with undiagnosed ME in the 1970s, a time when women’s pain and illnesses were ignored to the point of tragedy: Nic and her brother were nearly taken away. The act of writing this book reveals to her the impact of a childhood spent not wanting to worry an ill parent. Counselling helps her to unlock her writing. ‘Can open; worms everywhere’ reads her journal.

A withdrawn but clever child, silent in class, Nic begins to find comfort in reading, and self-expression in drama. At university, she locates soulmates, a partner, and a land she really loves in the north-east of England. Happiness begins to percolate through habitual anxiety and mysterious seizures. But when she and her new husband are uprooted to move to Hertfordshire, the balance again becomes precarious, and she seeks a new anchor. It is her exploration of this unpromisingly (to her) tame landscape, that for me contains the most interesting and thoughtful writing. Through observation, research, and natural curiosity she digs below Hitchin’s historic reputation as a centre for lavender and finds it was also once famous for its nightingales. She learns which Victorian collector planted the giant sequoias, and how the land was worked, and enclosed. The fossils found in the railway embankment lead her to imagine how a Conulus (extinct sea urchin) made its way under Cretaceous oceans. She introduces her small children to nature, discovering plants and insects on the way to school, and starts to grow vegetables. Alongside the quotidian, she seeks to explore what the land means to her and why. ‘And what it could, or possibly should, mean to every one of us.’

The book is laced with personal pain. After suffering post-natal depression, Nic receives a late diagnosis of coeliac disease, and outlines the inconveniences of a diet that not only restricts food choices but inhibits her social life. In flashbacks, she uncovers how her dissociative seizures could have been caused by past trauma, subconsciously triggered by extreme emotion. Gradually, and against her natural instinct, she lays herself open about how these fits make her feel as though she is trapped in an alternative reality, horribly ashamed. Then her health crisis deepens: ‘fatigue and anxiety, my old nemeses, have called on a new accomplice, pain, to complete the unholy Trinity.’

Adenomyosis, an excruciating uterine condition, is tardily diagnosed and unsuccessfully treated, echoing her mother’s story.

She turns to landscape as her salvation, sitting it out in local wooded wetlands. As she hits rock bottom, her busy writer’s mind finds parallels. ‘When you reach that lowest point, it’s worth taking a careful look at the bedrock that caused your fall.’ She identifies with mineral beneath her feet: ‘Though I’d like to be flint…I’m all chalk.’

Parts of this book are cris de cœur, painful to read. And in contemplating the state of nature, Nic Wilson inevitably deals with loss. ‘What have my children done to deserve this?’ She also – not that this is a comfort – finds parallels in the past. The famous nightingales hit a sudden decline in the 1880s. And she asks a question about our relationship with history that resonated with me most:

‘I want to ask how, without an awareness of local landscape history, without some sense of what once existed – those plants, animals, habitats we have disregarded, forgotten and destroyed – we can ever truly assess the legacy we’re leaving for future generations.’

Land Beneath the Waves is published by Summersdale. 

Laura Parker has also reviewed The Place of Tides by James Rebanks

See also Nature Cure, by Richard Mabey, reviewed by Linda Newbery

Guest review by Tina Jackson: FEATHERHOOD by Charlie Gilmour

 

"A beautiful book about the nature of what is wild, and what can and cannot be tamed; about nature and nurture and how the two can co-exist."

Tina Jackson is a writer and journalist, and the author of the novel The Beloved Children (Fahrenheit Press), a short fiction collection Stories from the Chicken Foot House (Markosia) and a book of non-fiction about working class women and the struggle for the vote in her hometown, Leeds. See more on Tina's website.

In tales of enchantment, the arrival of a talking animal always has a particular significance, taking the person who encounters it – invariably someone in need of its counsel – over the boundary of what is usual and into the realms of the extraordinary. And while Charlie Gilmour’s Featherhood is not fiction, folk, or fairy tale, and Benzene - the magpie whose presence in his life provoked this telling - only ever speaks in crow, it tells a real-life transformation tale that casts an extraordinary spell.

Featherhood weaves life writing and nature writing to tell the story of how a gentle and troubled person was helped to make sense of his relationship with his absent father, and to prepare for becoming a father to his own child, by the presence in his life of a baby magpie. As Benzene, who Gilmour initially expects will not survive, thrives, she becomes fiercely attached to Gilmour and his partner Yana, and they to her. Nothing, in the wake of this profound inter-species connection, will ever be the same, and the wild bird is an agent of healing and chaos in equal measure.

Writing in luminous, clear prose, Charlie conjures a cast of human and avian characters no less fantastical or compelling for being real, and relates how he is taught by the magpie that he can also look after a human child and be a good and loving parent.

His biological father Heathcote Williams is the trickster in the tale: a slippery figure whose identities switched seamlessly between poet, magician, anarchist, absentee father and a person whose entire existence reads as a play of smoke and mirrors and leaves a trail of hurt, pain and abandoned relationships, such as the one with his son, in his wake. The twin threads of the story are the unfolding tale of Gilmour’s relationship with Benzene and his attempts to unravel the mystery of why his complex, charismatic father was unable to have anything but a fragmented relationship with his son. The book is shot through with down to earth humour, too, with the antics of the bird an obvious highlight and the succinct dismissal of Heathcote Williams’ mercurial behaviour by Gilmour’s staunch, loving, stepfather. ‘What a wanker,’ he sums him up, with this reader cheering him from a ringside seat.

This is a beautiful book about the nature of what is wild, and what can and cannot be tamed; about nature and nurture and how the two can co-exist; about what can and cannot be known; about families and how the past does not have to repeat into the present, and about the transformative power not just of love, but of care. It’s a story about being open to possibility and accepting responsibility – for the fierce demands of a bird that stashes meat in Gilmour’s hair and for the human baby who arrives after Gilmour has learned that he isn’t fated to repeat the example of his own father. It’s a story about understanding something that is other, whether that’s a creature of another species or a human being who behaves in ways that are less comprehensible than those of a wild creature. It’s a story of reconciliation with the past and accepting the numinous encounters that lead to becoming. Above all, Featherhood is an exceptional, beautiful and wonderfully told story about how to create a stable nest, and feather it with love, compassion and understanding. It may not be fiction, but it really is a magical tale.

Featherhood is published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

Tina Jackson's The Beloved Children is reviewed here by Yvonne Coppard.

Guest review by Elizabeth Enfield: THE BEGINNER'S GOODBYE by Anne Tyler

Photograph by Sarah Ketalaars

Elizabeth Enfield is a journalist, novelist, short story writer and intermittent teacher of all. Her short stories have been published in various magazines and broadcast on Radio 4 and her latest novel, Ivy and Abe, is out now, published by Penguin. For more details see her website, or follow her on twitter @lizzieenfield

Anne Tyler has written twenty novels and, while only having read about a quarter of her output, I’m a huge fan of her work. In a world where the news and the bookshops often appear to be dominated by crime, tragedy and acts of inconceivable darkness, Tyler’s sphere is domestic: the quotidian drama of ordinary existence. She writes about it in a way that is utterly compelling, vividly imagining the smallest details and shining a sympathetic and understanding light on the human condition.

Tyler’s last novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was nominated for the Booker Prize - an utterly deserving contender and one I loved, but I’ve chosen an earlier novel, The Beginner’s Goodbye, to review here. It’s a short, almost novella length book, but contains everything that Tyler does so well: turning the ordinary into something extraordinary, lending difficult characters a certain nobility and rendering the mundane remarkable.

I recently chose to revisit this novel as my next book is about grief, about what happens to the parents of a child, who are long separated, following the death of their only child. Grief is not the most uplifting subject to tackle and yet Tyler has addressed it repeatedly in her novels, teaming it with her familiar theme of regret, one of grief’s chief companions.

The chief protagonist and narrator of The Beginner’s Goodbye is Aaron Woolcott, an emotionally repressed man, with a partial paralysis that necessitates walking with a stick and a bad stutter. He works for the family publishing company, a vanity press and home to the Beginners series of guides to small slices of life, mirroring Tyler’s own fictional territory.

Aaron’s wife Dorothy, a no nonsense doctor and eight years older, is a “non caretaker” where his mother and sister are cosseters, even in Aaron’s mid thirties. Their marriage functions on lack of fuss and fairly minimal interaction. But when Dorothy dies in a freak accident – involving an oak tree, a sun porch and elusive biscuits - Aaron’s carefully constructed world begins to fall apart.

He rejects the sympathy of friends and colleagues, throws away their kindly meant casseroles and appears to take a self-punishing delight in not needing anyone.

But then Dorothy starts showing up, the most un-spectral ghostly apparition ever: a solid presence, which Aaron summons up out of his loneliness.

Initially, she only drops by briefly but then she stays for longer. They talk, and bicker the way ordinary perfectly happily but not that happily married people do. Through their encounters, the limitations of the marriage are gradually revealed and Aaron begins to realize and regret the cost of his self-protective shell and unwillingness to open up to others.

With solid spectral Dorothy he finds it much easier to talk honestly and openly than he did with the real one. He even loses his stutter when they chat! And slowly he begins to say goodbye, and at the same time to say hello to the world, in a way he has never done before.

What Tyler captures here, so well, is the contradictions of the human condition: how we can love so imperfectly and feel so deeply the loss of someone to whom we are almost tragically mismatched.

In the pages of crime novels, we find resolution about what’s happened. In Tyler’s slices of life we find emotional resolutions – small but truthful ones.

On the penultimate page of The Beginner’s Goodbye, Aaron discusses whether the dead ever really visit with his friend Luke.

Luke thinks they don’t. “But I think if you knew them well enough, if you’d listened to them closely enough, while they were still alive, you might be able to imagine what they would tell you even now.”

It’s a beautiful sentiment, one which Aaron decides to heed. And one which beautifully illustrates the appeal of Tyler’s writing. She pays close attention to her characters; so close that still talk to you, long after the final pages of the novels they grace.

The Beginner's Goodbye is published by Vintage.

Guest review by Cindy Jefferies: DEAD BABIES AND SEASIDE TOWNS by Alice Jolly

"Jolly’s ability to write about tragedy without making it tragic is extraordinary."

Cindy Jefferies has been writing for for various publishers since 2001, with her Fame School titles being continually in print for over ten years, and translated into 16 languages. In 2016 she was invited to be artistic director of the children’s part of the inaugural Stroud Book Festival in Gloucestershire. Out of that came the idea for a children’s festival, of which she is joint co-ordinator with Rick Vick. She lives in Stroud, and splits her time between writing, festival work, refugee aid and looking after her young granddaughter. She is a member of the Society of Authors and the Scattered Authors' Society. Apart from enjoying a glass of wine with friends she likes parking her mini camper van on the land she owns with her sisters, having a brew-up and enjoying the wildlife.

Profoundly moving, this memoir begins with a traumatic pregnancy and tragic stillbirth. But as Alice Jolly tells us, she has never had much time for the me, me, me, of memoir. This award-winning book, published by Unbound and winner of both the V S Pritchett Award and the PEN Ackerley Award, is many things. It manages to be uplifting and controversial, occasionally funny as well as tragic, and asks at least as many questions as it gives answers.

What is it that drives us on, as human beings? That is the question that remained in my mind when I finished the book. The simple answer is the desire to succeed, but when does that become unreasonable, or foolish? When is it admirable, understandable? Alice Jolly retreated to one seaside town or another, places she describes as the “ultimate act of defiance,” to recuperate between miscarriages. At one point she likens herself and her husband to gamblers. “We have become like gamblers who have lost so much that only a win can save them. Good money after bad.” She tries hard to come to terms with the situation. Unlike so many, they already have one healthy child. Surely they should be happy with that? Perhaps only those who have suffered the loss of a stillborn child will understand, or maybe no one can ever really, at the deepest level, understand what drives another.

At its simplest, this book is about a woman who refuses to accept that her family is complete. But it is also about money. With money, so much more is possible. IVF, donor eggs, adoption, surrogacy. Do these possibilities ameliorate the situation, or make it worse? Other questions arise. Morality, the law, mental health, the impact on others. This is a personal story, but it is also more than that, and I think, an important book. It is, too, beautifully written, honest, and without self pity. I shied away from reading it for a long time because I thought I would find it too emotionally difficult. When I found the courage, my fear was totally unfounded. Not only did the language draw me in, it is also just so darned interesting.

Jolly’s ability to write about tragedy without making it tragic is extraordinary. By managing somehow to stand a little outside her experience she shields the reader, without compromising the truth. This is, perhaps, the writer’s detachment Leonard Woolf describes so well in his autobiography, World Within World. However arrived at, the treatment serves this book exceptionally well. There are thoughts, too about how to process difficulties, and the role of emotional authenticity. Nowadays, “Everybody has to be allowed to feel what they feel, express, process…..But now I begin to realise that there may be events too big to process. Sometimes the only way to survive is to get up and walk on without looking back.”

Alice Jolly surrounds her story with place and time, with just enough detail to make us feel the seasons and years as they pass. Brussels, London and Stroud are all places that have been called home, while the coast is not somewhere to live, but a place to retreat to from time to time. And there is the beautiful house up high in the Cotswolds: a house so draughty that the heating is pointless. The house takes time and energy and emotion while it is renovated, but at last it is beautifully restored, and contains a family that eventually, touchingly, feels complete.

Dead Babies and Seaside Towns is published by Unbound.

Guest review by Miriam Moss: GRIEF IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS by Max Porter

Miriam is an award-winning writer of fiction - short stories, novels and picture books. She grew up in Africa, China and the Middle East before living in England. After graduating, she taught English until the arrival of her first child, when she began writing.

Her latest short story, Salvage, is published in the Fish Anthology 2017, and her novel, Girl on a Plane, a fictionalised account of a real life hijacking experienced while travelling alone in the Middle East aged 15, is published by Andersen/ Penguin Random House. Her next novel is set in Africa.

She has published many picture books, including Matty takes Off (Andersen), Bare Bear (Hodder), Wibble Wobble (Orchard), I Forgot to Say I Love You! (Macmillan) and Bad Hare Day (Bloomsbury). Her latest is Dr Molly’s Medicine Chest (Walker).

Miriam lives in Lewes, Sussex, has three grown up children and works in a converted triangular potting shed in the garden. See more on her website.

Behind the Emily Dickinson–derived title – her poem is called Hope is the Thing with Feathers - is a short, finely crafted prose poem. The wonderfully compact, moving narrative is a meditation on grief, but it’s also a surprisingly funny book, as well as a clever and highly original read.

A mother has died suddenly, leaving a grieving writer. the father of two young sons, bereft and in disarray. The father, who attempts to come to terms with his wife’s death, is writing a book about Ted Hughes (called Ted Hughes’ Crow on the Couch: A Wild Analysis) when, one night, a huge crow bursts through the door of their London flat.

Crow, the mythic creature from Ted Hughes’ poetry, is a trickster, a philosopher of death and rebirth, who intends to stay, and he joins Dad and Boys in a trio of alternating voices, full of energy and unpredictability.

Crow, who has elements of the shaman, describes himself as ‘ … friend, excuse, deus ex machina, joke, symptom, figment, spectre, crutch, toy, phantom, gag, analyst and babysitter.’ His relationship to the father is as chaotic and unpredictable as grief itself. He’s protective, predatory - and then suddenly sensuous: ‘I prised open his mouth and counted bones, snacked a little on his unbrushed teeth, flossed him, crowly tossed his tongue hither, thither, I lifted the duvet. I Eskimo kissed him. I butterfly kissed him.’

Though the book’s emotional landscape is desolate, there’s plenty of black humour that playfully derails the reader’s expectations. The writing shifts from tragic to uplifting, from Crow’s mocking hilarity to the awful sorrow of the father and the heart-wrenching sadness of the two boys.

The domestic landscape is never far off. Grief, we are told, needs time to heal, but from the father the boys have other more ordinary needs: ‘washing powder, nit shampoo, football stickers, batteries, bows, arrows, bows, arrows’.

The mother, whose life has been cut cruelly short, is evoked by the details of how she lived: ‘She won’t ever use (make-up, turmeric, hairbrush, thesaurus)./She will never finish (Patricia Highsmith novel, peanut butter, lip balm)./And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for her birthday.’ And it is only at Crow’s leave-taking that we hear how she died. ‘Accident in the home./She banged her head, dreamed a bit, was sick, slept, got up and fell,/Lay down and died. A trickle of blood from an ear.’

Together, Crow and Dad work through his grief, and, during the final session, they look back: ‘You’ll remember with some of my early work with you,’ Crow says, ‘that what appeared to be primal corvid vulgarity was in fact a highly articulated care programme, designed to respond to the nuances of your recovery.’

I particularly enjoyed the fact that the story also becomes a meditation on the difficulty of writing. Porter, at one point, advises that the only way to write, in this case about love and loss, is ... to begin.

Summary: Grief is as unique as you are.

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers is published by Faber.  

THE FACTS OF LIFE by Paula Knight, reviewed by Linda Newbery

"The charm, skill and wit of the drawings, recalling Posy Simmonds, and the cleverness and variety of page design, fully involve the reader in a tale that is very personal but never self-pitying."

Linda Newbery won the Costa Children's Book Prize with Set in Stone, a young adult novel set in Sussex in the late 19th Century. She is the editor of Writers Review.

I don’t have children, and am sometimes expected to account for that to inquisitive strangers. “Oh? Is that from choice, or …?” is a frequent response to what seems to be taken as an admission, rather than a statement, of my childless state. These casual questioners seem unaware that that innocuous “or … ?” might possibly plumb depths of grief or loss (though not in my case) which no stranger has any right to probe. As for the idea of choosing not to have children … such a decision is often viewed as peculiar or selfish. Last year, indiscreet remarks from Andrea Leadsom, then a contender for the Conservative party leadership, prompted explanations from her rival Theresa May about why she’s childless: explanations which no male politician would ever be required to give. Yes, we’re in the 21^st Century (where, as Paula Knight points out, the world hardly needs more inhabitants) but still it seems that women are required to be wives and mothers by default; or, if not, to have some good excuse ready for those demanding to know why not. 

The Facts of Life confronts this head on. I met Paula years ago on an Arvon course and have tracked her progress since as a successful illustrator of children’s books.  This is a new departure: a memoir told and shown in versatile comic-strip form. Referring to herself as ‘Polly’, though it’s clearly her own experience she draws on, Paula traces her early and adult years, from her awareness of bodily functions and sex, on through career opportunities, relationships and friends’ pregnancies (exclamations and congratulations followed swiftly by a sense of inadequacy – this shown so neatly in talking heads and speech balloons, no commentary needed) to conception, loss and finally resignation and adaptation. It’s striking how little the Swinging Sixties and the arrival of the contraceptive pill affected the advice given to teenage girls in the 1970s: ‘Polly’, born in 1969, got from parents and teachers the clear expectation that marriage and motherhood were to be her destiny.

Post-viral fatigue syndrome and the break-up of a relationship take Polly into her thirties, when a new man, Jack, offers a new chance. Flexible page layouts animate her dilemma. While an hourglass trickles down the centre of one page, two Pollys face each other from either side: one a paint-spattered artist, the other smugly pregnant, her baby-bulge counterpointing the inward curve of the glass.  On another page, a Janus-headed Polly looks left and right at the pros and cons of being a mother. “’Sometime later’ was here now … “  While examinations and tests continue, a well-meaning acquaintance tells her, “You’ll never know love quite like it unless you have children,“ – a familiar statement that pushes other kinds of love into second or third place. The excitement of conception is followed swiftly by miscarriage, more than once, and we accompany Polly as she cocoons herself against the platitudes offered so kindly by friends. The graphic approach works brilliantly here, as we see her assaulted by music, noise, words and visions. Finally, when the barrage of tests and the whirlwind of expectation and disappointment become too much, Polly and her very supportive Jack begin to examine their future without children.

In one drawing a crack in the wall behind two talking heads widens and splits as Polly counters the assumptions of a former friend preoccupied with childcare. Facing a campaign poster image of the clichéd ‘hardworking families’ beloved of politicians, Polly reflects, “As a person without kids, you must prepare to be effaced in a society where ‘family’ means ‘children’.” But compensations are to be found in the natural world and in new friendships – and, self-evidently, in art. The decision not to persevere is not an ending, but the start of new explorations and a reassessment of values.

There’s quite detailed medical information throughout, but also humour and a light touch. In one drawing, a deceased Polly sits upright in her wicker coffin to ask, “Um, do you have ‘Farewell Regality’ by Rachel Unthank and the Winterset?” If she doesn’t have children, who will be around in her old age to take care of such things? The charm, skill and wit of the drawings, recalling Posy Simmonds, and the cleverness and variety of page design, fully involve the reader in a tale that is very personal but never self-pitying. This is a tricky balance to strike, and Paula Knight is to be congratulated for producing a book which will be of particular value and comfort to people of both genders whose experience is similar to Polly’s and Jack’s, but should also have wider appeal for its insight into the lives of others and for its exploration into the big questions of life: why are we here? What difference can we make in the world? 

The Facts of Life is published by Myriad Editions.

THE TIDAL ZONE by Sarah Moss, reviewed by Linda Newbery

"Her writing, never showy, is always fresh and insightful"

The stories we make for ourselves are a preoccupation of this absorbing novel: the sense and structures we want to impose on events that would otherwise seem random. The ability to hang on to life itself begins to seem random to narrator Adam Goldschmidt, when – and for ever after – his fifteen-year-old daughter Miriam has an anaphylactic attack in which her heart stops beating. There is no diagnosis, no known cause, so Miriam and her parents are left with the knowledge that it could happen again at any time.

Understandably, Adam becomes frightened by silence, compelled to keep listening at Miriam’s bedroom door in case she's stopped breathing. When other parents say that they can’t imagine what he’s going through, he wants to tell them (though “I didn’t say” becomes the refrain of his unspoken thoughts) “It is exactly as you imagine it. What you imagine is correct.” But “This is not what they, the parents, wanted me to say” – their professed lack of imagination is a kind of screening. And for Adam there is the new worry that his mother, who died young, could have had the same affliction, and has possibly passed it on to his younger daughter, Rose, as well as to Miriam.

Adam is a stay-at-home father, an 'unemployed PhD' who does a few hours’ university teaching but otherwise occupies himself in looking after his family and home. Topically, his wife Emma is an overstretched, over-conscientious GP who works such long hours that she barely has time for civility or eating. It’s Adam who takes care of school runs, laundry and family catering, in spare moments researching the building of the new Coventry Cathedral after its devastation in the Blitz. The competition, the winning design by Sir Basil Spence, the technical problems of acoustics and glass before the new cathedral could soar from the ruins, all seem to mirror the rebuilding of normality, or rather the new version of normality, after Miriam’s near death.  At first hospital routines dominate – the formidably intelligent and highly articulate Miriam seeming out of place in a children’s High Dependency Unit. Sarah Moss conveys a sense of removal from everyday concerns which will be familiar to anyone who’s attended a medical emergency in hospital. “How do you do it, I wanted to ask nurses, how do you return every day to this place where it is normal for children to die and parents to grieve?” But “The nurses’ world, the hospital version of normality, is true and what most of us here and now regard as ordinary life is a lie.” When he leaves the hospital, “Outside had been impossibly far away, like the memory of a country before the Revolution.”

On the face of it, Sarah Moss’s novel sounds grimly serious, dealing with Adam’s obsessive fear and his struggle, once Miriam returns home, to strike a balance between protecting and stifling her. But there’s an acerbic wit to Adam’s reflections (his awareness of how he’s seen by other men; his sense of compromise between socialist views and comfortable middle-class entitlement; his account of a university department meeting in a run-down classroom) and his interactions with Miriam. Perhaps implausibly precocious, she lightens the novel with her quickfire retorts; refusing to go to a cathedral service with her father, she tells him: “It’ll take more than coloured glass and old music to make me sign up to homophobia, misogyny and the grandfather of all patriarchal institutions.”

The repetitions of day-to-day life, newly precarious, are interspersed with the story of Adam’s father, the son of Austrian Jewish refugees who met in the States – again, the chanciness of family connections and heredity – who travelled from one commune to another in the sixties before reaching England. Some of his anecdotes – for example the tale of Adam’s mother and the connection she felt to the sea, to its tidal zones – have the feeling of folk-tale, here recalling selkies with their strange but often unhappy interactions with humans and their tendency to slip away unexpectedly.

Two-thirds of the way through, wondering where the plot would lead – will Adam’s marriage survive? Will there be another crisis for one or other of his daughters? – I realised that it didn’t matter: not because of any lack of concern for the characters, but because Sarah Moss is a writer I will happily follow wherever she chooses to go. Her writing, never showy, is always fresh and insightful. If you could know your loved ones’ futures, Adam wonders near the end, would you? “No. You think you want a story, you think you want an ending, but you don’t. You want life. You want disorder and ignorance and uncertainty.”

Linda Newbery
www.lindanewbery.co.uk