A first novel of dislocation, family damage and the pull of place.

Alice has left London for a suburban house after a death in the family, but the move does not offer the clean break it seems to promise. Instead, the ordinary textures of domestic life — gardens, neighbours, phones ringing, old memories, strange local encounters — begin to tilt into something more unsettled.

Gordon’s writing has that particular early-2010s literary unease: realist on the surface, but with a low, uncanny pressure running underneath. It is about grief, sisters, class, suburbia, disappearance, the difficulty of returning, and the way the familiar can suddenly become hostile. For readers who like psychologically alert contemporary fiction with a slightly off-centre, coastal/urban-gothic edge — Helen Dunmore, early Daisy Johnson, Tessa Hadley with more menace, or Deborah Levy’s stranger domestic weather.

Fig Tree / Penguin paperback, first published 2011, first printing. Good second-hand condition overall, with light handling, shelfwear and some page toning.