Set among the exhausted remains of the Anglo-Irish landed class, Good Behaviour is narrated by Aroon St Charles: dutiful daughter, unreliable witness, social disaster and one of the great comic monsters of twentieth-century fiction.

From the opening pages, in which she prepares a rabbit mousse for her dying mother, Aroon tells the story of her family’s decline with absolute confidence in her own tact, innocence and generosity. The reader is left to reconstruct the damage occurring just beyond the limits of her understanding.

Poverty, cruelty, sexual repression, neglect and grief are repeatedly converted into questions of manners. Aroon’s language is full of euphemism and self-protection, creating a widening gap between the story she believes she is telling and the bleak, often horrifying one visible underneath it. Published in 1981 after a long silence from fiction, Good Behaviour became Keane’s major late-career return and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It is a precise, viciously funny novel.

Abacus paperback, 1984 reprint. Noticeable cover creasing, scratching and edge wear; pages sound.