Every eye

Hattie, the narrator of this brilliant, elliptical novel, is 'a stranger by birth' and not really at home anywhere, least of all among her family.

It is her family who, when she was a girl, made her feel awkward in every walk of life - even at the piano, for which she had a real talent - and who reconciled her, long before her time, to the life of a shabby-genteel West London spinster.

She has understood very little of her own existence, a life seen, literally and metaphorically, through a squint, and remembers, with difficulty and confusion, her strange, aborted first love to a much older man - it is the central mystery of her life.Now, while in Ibiza with the carefree, younger man who has just become her husband, the meaning of her past is becoming clear, its hidden pattern emerging from gray English shadows into the yellow Mediterranean sun.