Last Summer by Kylie Ladd

A novel about the aftermath of a sudden death shouldn’t be warm and uplifting, but Australian neuropsychologist-turned-novelist Kylie Ladd’s Last Summer is above all a tale of lightness. It’s also absorbing, and harmonious in spite of the many schisms it describes.

The death is that of Rory, a 39-year-old family man who collapses from an aortic aneurysm at a practice for his social cricket team. Rory was beloved by his circle of close friends: his sister Kelly and her husband Joe, James and the aloof Anita, Nick and Laine, and Pete and Trinity. There are small children, jobs and businesses, unvoiced resentments and unfinished or yet-to-begin romantic business. The loss of Rory, whose mischievous, rebellious persona was the group’s fulcrum, creates an immediate and predictable fragmentation.

Ladd opts for probably the best, and certainly the most straightforward, way to tell such a character-driven story – she gives several characters two or three chapters each. It reads as a series, over the ensuing year, of chronological vignettes offering glimpses into lives unified by shared history.

The death occurs in the first chapter and is seen from the viewpoint of Nick, Rory’s oldest and closest friend. In his absorption, Nick fails to notice Laine’s subsequent reconnection with a past love, a subplot which exemplifies Ladd’s close-reading of the effects of grief. She doesn’t care to show us the wailing and gnashing, but rather the real ramifications of loss experienced by those too young to be especially accustomed to it. As one character turns away from their own spouse, they might turn towards another’s – everyone seeking comfort, but causing greater ruptures.

The novel is unmistakably Australian, with every page seeming sun-drenched, from the barbecues to the after-work cricket practices and the Antipodean lingo – one character’s incipient football career ended when he “did his ankle”, while an irate Joe accuses his distracted teammates of playing like a “pack of [expletive] sheilas!”

And in its study of the male-female dynamic – much of the action seems driven by grief-heightened hormones – Last Summer is, unexpectedly, a novel about gender politics. The women are headstrong and self-possessed, at least in domains familiar to them. Laine is an accomplished architect, Trinity a social worker, Kelly a business owner, and Colleen, Rory’s widow, a former head nurse in an A&E department.

Anita, a stay-at-home mother, feels young, inadequate and alien by comparison, but it is she who acts most assertively in relation to her marriage, and Laine who turns out to have the weakest hold on her sense of self.

Women control Last Summer’s middle-class suburbia, if not the world, and whether these marriages fracture or endure will depend on the choices made solely by the wives. Joe is portrayed as lost and yearning, for his wife, whose unusually close relationship with her brother only intensifies with his death. Another husband is spurned altogether.

Ladd’s characters are not especially introspective, and their responses to the tragedy are entirely consistent with the personalities she gives them. The story of grief and its corollaries is one that will never grow tired, and Ladd’s version, vivid and unsentimental, is oddly heartening, and well worth reading for it.

3 / 5 stars: Australian suburbanites get sad, go a little mad.

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State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Of all the memorable scenes in Ann Patchett’s extraordinary outsiders-in-the-Amazon novel State of Wonder, the passage in which a small boy fights an anaconda might be the most brain-searing. As the protagonist, Dr Marina Singh, struggles to pull the snake from his body as it slowly squeezes away his life, the tail begins “to wrap around her wrist. It was a muscle like nothing she had ever encountered. It did not fight against her. It did not notice her.”

But then, it’s hard to pick just one: it’s a tale in which a Caesarean section is performed on a septuagenarian, and deep in a jungle alive with mosquitoes, a tribe lives free from malaria. That it all makes perfect sense, could be no other way, is testament to Patchett’s inventiveness and dexterity as a storyteller.

The boy in question is Easter, a deaf-mute abandoned by his tribe who has fetched up with the enigmatic, brilliant Dr Annick Swenson, like Marina an employee of pharmaceutical company Vogel. Eight years ago Swenson ventured into the wilds of Brazil to uncover the secrets of a hyper-fertile tribe, and she is yet to present her results. Increasingly impatient, Vogel has dispatched one Dr Anders Eckman to retrieve her, but as the novel opens, Marina receives a letter from Swenson announcing his death from fever.

Stricken both for herself – she and Eckman shared a laboratory for years – and for his wife and sons, and seeking respite from a tentative relationship with another, older colleague, Marina takes over Eckman’s mission to lure Swenson back.

The title may refer to many facets of this treasure-chest of a story: the boundless mysteries of this Amazonian settlement and the fecund Lakashi; the professional obsession that drives Swenson to subject herself to experimentation; the dream-state, a mixture of horror, fear, fascination and joy, that characterizes Marina’s experience in the jungle; and the reader’s absorption in a story of incomparable majesty.

Swenson’s two areas of research are counterpoints: her discoveries about the reasons for the prolonged fertility of Lakashi women (Marina is confronted by the sight of a heavily pregnant 70-something on more than one occasion, and the Lakashi birth rate is five times that of other tribes in the region) will be of enormous value in the West, where infertility is on the rise in some demographics.

Meanwhile, what this research has revealed about the unique local flora leads Swenson to discover an apparent natural inoculation against malaria, still a widely fatal disease in many tropical developing countries.

Patchett’s mastery of a world in which many writers have stumbled is perhaps the most notable aspect of this deeply impressive work. State of Wonder, in theme and nature, is subject to comparison with Joseph Conrad’s seminal Heart of Darkness, but its feminine perspective and distinctly 21^st-century sensibility are among many marked differences between the two.

She creates heart-wrenching scenarios that are neither melodramatic nor unempathetic, merely human. The idiosyncrasies of the Lakashi are presented as no more peculiar than that of Swenson, and watching the latter’s impenetrable cloak fall, her secrets surface, is thrilling. As if infused with the seemingly magic plants she describes in her story, Patchett has put the human condition under a microscope and emerged with a novel of lasting greatness.

4 / 5 stars: A tale of the unexpected, told by a virtuoso.

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A Tiny Bit Marvellous by Dawn French

At last, comedienne nonpareil (as her Oscar Battle might say) Dawn French has turned her prodigious talents towards fiction. Her first book, her 2008 memoir Dear Fatty, met with rapturous applause and triggered, French says in the authorial Q&A that ends her first novel A Tiny Bit Marvellous, a love of writing solo that took her by surprise, and a new desire to write fiction. And the prolific output for which she is known is no less evident in this new medium – even as this delightful family comedy hits shop shelves, she is at work on her sophomore novel, with a fresh set of characters.

A Tiny Bit Marvellous – a Frenchian title if ever there was one – is the story of the Battle family, specifically psychologist mum Mo, stroppy 17-year-old Dora, and her younger brother Peter, who wishes to be known as Oscar in a nod to his hero Oscar Wilde and who may be the most unabashedly, colourfully camp teen character ever committed to the pages of a comic novel.

Mo has hit the wall of middle age, feeling, as her sagacious mother Pamela points out, that she is no longer admired. Walking down the street one day, she catches sight of a nondescript woman in a drab grey coat in the reflection of a shop window. The shock of this vision of herself, combined with a 20-year-old, pleasant but unexciting marriage and life with teenagers, sends Mo spinning in the direction of a tryst with a new colleague, Noel, whose New Zealandness, she amusingly observes, adds to his “exoticism.”

Dora, hopeful, insecure and mercurial, lurches between fad diets and endless Facebook conversations, obsesses over plans for her 18^th birthday party and litters her speech with “like” and “Oh my complete and utter God”, pausing periodically to fire off “I h8 you” texts to a hapless Mo.

Oscar is an utter joy and deserves a novel all of his own. A film too. He is foppish and fearless and exceptionally well-drawn, and his scenes with Pamela, to whose home he decamps for his beloved banoffee pie when the strain of yearning for a proper smoking jacket becomes too much, are as sweet as the pie (for which French includes the recipe).

It is to French’s credit that she finds such depth in what could be dimensionless characters: she plumbs beneath Dora’s monstrous carapace to the vulnerable, appealing girl beneath, contrasting the delicate nature of her ego with Oscar’s unstereotypical sureness of self (I couldn’t watch him shift his affections from Noel to a tragedy-stricken schoolmate without grinning).

It is written in diary form, with brief chapters switching between each of the three primary characters’ perspectives and voices. Mr Battle garners only one chapter of his own, but it’s a doozy, and brings to a climax a storyline that takes a while to gather steam. As French notes in the Q&A, she realized she was “a third of the way through and hadn’t started the main part of the story yet . . . I had to go back and start threading in a bit of tension.”

This does show in the finished product, but no matter – the slow-burn effect adds oomph to the affecting resolution of this story of the Battles. It’s more than a bit marvellous.

3.5 / 5 stars: A great comedienne’s detour into fiction is a treasure for the reader.

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Afterwards by Rosamund Lupton

A mother, her two children and a fire at their elite private school. It’s another stomach-churning premise from English writer Rosamund Lupton, following last year’s bestselling missing-person drama Sister.

Afterwards is a curious mélange, part quasi-ghost story, part family drama and part suspense thriller. It works – sort of.

When the fire breaks out, 17-year-old student nurse Jenny is in the highly flammable art classroom at the top of the building. Grace, attending the school sports day in which her son Adam is competing, sees the flames and rushes into the building in search of her daughter. Both are badly injured.

That the fire was caused by arson is established, as is – in Grace’s mind, at least – a short-list of suspects. (Momentarily we will come to how Grace can be acting as private detective when she is comatose in a hospital bed.)

One is Donald White, the husband of Grace’s friend Maisie and father of Jenny’s schoolmate Rowena, who suffered burns to her hands while attempting to rescue Jenny. Another is Annette Jenks, the dippy new secretary who is found to have been careless about her upkeep of the school’s comprehensive security protocols.

Then there is the woman Annette replaced, Elizabeth Fisher, recently forced into retirement. Finally, there is Silas Hyman, a disgruntled ex-staff member whose circumstances scream motive and who Lupton dangles in front of her reader like a carrot for much of the novel’s 470 pages.

Silas was fired from his teaching position over a playground incident in which a child suffered two broken legs. Though we are never encouraged to believe that he was guilty of the negligence of which he was accused (and Lupton comes up with an extraordinary child-sociopath for an alibi), his messy marriage and the suggestion of an entanglement with Jenny consume much of Grace’s attention – even as we know she should be looking elsewhere.

Afterwards is a book in which the darkest things happen. The backstory of Silas Hyman’s sacking is savage, the tale the principal spins to parents to explain the departure of the much-loved secretary is downright cruel, and the climax is designed to leave you feeling a little less safe in the world.

But whether you find Afterwards absorbing or irritating will largely depend on your ability and inclination to suspend disbelief, for the plot trick that allows Lupton’s two principals, Grace and Jenny, to exercise omniscience despite being unconscious and immobile in hospital beds is their evolution into living ghosts. They can roam the halls of the hospital, eavesdrop on conversations and even venture outside in the company of their loved ones, who are unaware of their sub-spectral presence.

They sit in on the interrogations conducted by Grace’s policewoman sister-in-law and spy on those Grace has pinpointed as suspects, meeting periodically to review their findings. It’s not dissimilar in spirit and mission to Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry and will seem preposterous to some, but Lupton’s empathy for her characters and engrossing narration of what becomes a search for justice is admirable.

2.5 / 5 stars: An engrossing mélange.

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The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

Yasuko Hanaoka has what many would consider a good life. She lives in a small but comfortable Tokyo apartment, works in a bento shop and has raised her school-age daughter Misato alone since her split from her former husband, Shinji Togashi.

Misato’s paternity is never addressed in Keigo Higashino’s sharp The Devotion of Suspect X, a procedural that hit the bestseller list hit in Japan in 2005 and is newly translated for the English-speaking world, just as a film adaptation is in the works. Togashi was not Misato’s biological parent but her stepfather, and something of a brute – though Yasuko ended the marriage several years before the story begins, he has turned up periodically to demand money and enjoy the distress he still causes Misato.

In the fateful scene that sets up the plot, he visits the Hanaoka apartment, taunting Yasuko and refusing to leave until she gives him 20,000 yen. But it seems not money he’s after but a way back into her life and that of her daughter, and it’s when he turns his attention to the cowering Misato that her mother snaps.

The flash of what was a diabolical family dynamic is revealing: Yasuko is not so much afraid as irritated and weary, but Misato’s evident fear creates an air of menace that dissipates, albeit briefly, when Togashi lies dead, strangled with an electrical cord.

The matter of a dead body is a greater problem than Yasuko can solve, but with her reclusive neighbour Ishigami’s Sherlock Holmes-esque entrance into the story, the corpse quickly vanishes and an alibi is concocted in the event of the body’s discovery and the attention of the police.

With that, a complex web is woven. Ishigami has at once rescued and indebted Yasuko. And as we learn from his old university acquaintance, Manabu Yukawa, who returns to Ishigami’s life in the wake of the murder, the mathematician-turned-high school teacher was known by his fellow students as ‘Ishigami the Buddha’, such was his affinity for the unknown and his unreadable demeanour. It is in this implacability, and the impossibility of gauging the extent of Ishigami’s motivation and what he is capable of doing in service of it, that the intrigue lies.

Yukawa plays a savant-like role in the story, liaising alternately with the lead detective, Kusanagi (another Imperial University alum), and Ishigami as the investigation unfolds. It is he who realizes Ishigami’s feelings for Yasuko are beyond mere neighbourly concern. Towards the end, it becomes clear that Yukawa now understands everything, but he won’t solve Kusanagi’s case for him, preferring to invite the detective to see the crime through a different lens.

If you think of The Devotion of Suspect X as a literary episode Law & Order: Tokyo you won’t be far off – it is a tightly plotted procedural stemming from a single dramatic event that delivers, as the jacket promises, ‘an ending you’ll never guess’. And, surprisingly, it’s a story that could translate easily to any Western city. Higashino has a knack for finding the universal in the criminal and deserves fame beyond Japan.

3.5 / 5 stars: With this highly original thriller, Keigo Higashino’s fame is sure to spread.

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Smokin’ Seventeen by Janet Evanovich

Seventeen books in to her bestselling series, Janet Evanovich has her high-voltage, man-juggling bounty hunter Stephanie Plum right where she wants her. With pneumatic partner Lula always close at hand to provide comic relief and practical back-up, Stephanie enters Smokin’ Seventeen with a romantic dilemma and, possibly, under a curse.

As in previous outings, she continues to juggle an open relationship with a local cop, Joe Morelli, with regular trysts with a security expert, Ranger. Indisputably, she neither needs nor is seeking further personal entanglements – but her family puts paid to that by ushering in one Dave Brewer, the son of a family friend who has returned to the Plum stomping ground, blue-collar Trenton, New Jersey, following a messy legal entanglement and subsequent business and marital failures.

Shortly before the predictably awkward set-up, Stephanie is bailed up at a doughnut shop by Morelli’s fearsome grandmother, Bella, who gives her ‘the eye’ and curses her with unspecified maladies.

At the same time, a body is discovered on the property of Vincent Plum Bail Bonds, where Stephanie works for her cousin. In all, five bodies are found, and Trenton authorities are on the trail of a serial killer. It speaks to the rich vein of mirth in Evanovich’s storytelling that the killings and the apparent effects of the curse carry equal portions of the plot.

The curse, it transpires, may relate to Stephanie’s libido, and certainly relates to a memorable scene involving a Porsche 911 and a blind alley in the bad part of town. The serial killer, for his part, will be lucky indeed to elude the snare of Stephanie and luscious Lula, who advocates regular fried-chicken breaks and takes imaginative umbrage at being called ‘fat’ (news of an upcoming Stephanie Plum movie, with Katherine Heigl in the starring role, is heartening chiefly for the prospect of Lula being brought to celluloid life).

It’s fitting that Smokin’ Seventeen reads like a high-camp action movie. When Lula tires of the histrionics exhibited by one of the pair’s ‘FTAs’ (for failure to appear, the people they make a living from tracking down and returning to custody), she merely pulls her stun-gun out of her purse and zaps him. He’s not a threat – he believes himself to be a vampire, and Stephanie and Lula have tracked him down at the local funeral home, where he spends his days in a casket.

Later, Stephanie refutes the unwanted advances of an admirer by belting him in the side of the head with her hairdryer and leaving him outside her apartment to take his leave once he has come to. She also pulls the stun-gun trick on a less-than-kindly stranger who elbows her in a queue. Never are Stephanie and Lula subjected to legal chastisement or read the civil rights riot act. That would just spoil the fun.

It’s light fiction, no question, but Evanovich has a rare talent for comic writing, and readers rightly keep returning to her tightly bordered world in which the usual rules don’t apply. While Sizzling Sixteen seemed to suffer from a lack of inspiration – Stephanie went through her paces, but appeared plagued by a vague malaise – Smokin’ Seventeen has her back on form.

3 / 5 stars: Evanovich doesn’t falter for a moment in Stephanie Plum’s most audaciously camp outing yet.

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Fallen by Karin Slaughter

Karin Slaughter likes a strong woman. Take one of her recurring characters, Special Agent Faith Mitchell, for whom she has created quite a backstory. Pregnant at 14, Faith mustered the fortitude to give birth to her son, complete high school, and later train to serve in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, where she eventually met her professional partner, Will Trent.

Not content with this degree of multitasking, by the time Slaughter opens her new novel, Fallen, she has given Faith a four-month-old daughter, who is cared for by her grandmother, retired Atlanta police chief Evelyn Mitchell, while Faith works.

Slaughter, true to form, makes the opening passages of her nearly 400-page tome count. Arriving home later than expected because of a meeting overrun, Faith exits her car to see a trail of blood leading to the front door, her infant daughter locked in the shed, and her mother’s gun missing from the shed safe. Minutes later, her home is filled with the bodies of local gang members and drug mules.

Evelyn, whose blood is at the scene, is nowhere to be found, and thanks to a curtain-twitching neighbour, questions emerge about what the ex-cop was really up to of a morning. Why was she leaving the house for hours each day with an Hispanic man with gang connections? And does it have anything to do with the corruption scandal that tainted members of her squad and forced her departure?

Fallen is less of a whodunit than a who-are-they. Regular Slaughter cast members Will Trent and Dr Sara Linton enter the fray to conduct the investigation, establish the identities of the dead men and help locate Evelyn, whose whereabouts are hinted at in brief, grisly scenes. Just as importantly for long-time readers, the pair continue their fraught but unconsummated liaison, complicated by Will’s unstable estranged wife and the ghost of Sara’s late husband, who was a prominent presence in earlier novels.

Slaughter has painstakingly developed the personalities of Faith, Sara, Will and others over 10 years’ worth of books, in her series set in the fictional Georgia region of Grant County. In an enlightening postscript to Fallen, she sheds some light on her reasoning for moving her characters to the big smoke of Atlanta: among them, that the rising number of grisly deaths in Grant County would beg the question of why anyone would continue to live there, and that the blank canvas of a large city was too rich for a writer to ignore.

Fallen isn’t her best work – despite her evident care, the plot feels flimsy and the pay-off, though plausible, is almost cynical. She is a writer of substance with a clear, fluid style, and it seems that with this outing, she has chosen to devote more energy to character growth than to the atypically pedestrian storyline. In particular, close calls for both Sara and Will appeared less important for plot purposes than for forcing each to confront their feelings.

Slaughter patently adores her characters, and takes some pride in planning their trajectories several novels ahead, leaving hints for readers as to what may come. The fictive potential of the city of Atlanta will be a test of this writer’s considerable skills.

3 / 5 stars: With character arcs to burn, this is one for the fans.

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The Girl in the Polka-dot Dress by Beryl Bainbridge

John Fury, a horse-farming, spiritually awakened Los Angeles lawyer.

Monsignor Secker, conducting Mass for the American casualties of Vietnam in a small town near the Great Lakes.

The two are among the large, well-drawn supporting cast of a beguilingly demented road trip that is the subject of Beryl Bainbridge’s final novel, The Girl in the Polka-dot Dress.

Rose and Harold are at the centre of the maelstrom. Rose arrives on the east coast of the United States on a one-way ticket from her grim home in Kentish Town, while Harold, an oddball bachelor, commandeers the rattletrap van in which they strike out for the west.

The two are introduced by a mutual acquaintance and at first, trying to work out precisely who they are is like peering through a dusty window – only the vaguest outlines can be discerned. Rose is young, pretty and damaged; Harold is older, and queer in the old-fashioned sense. He might be a sex pest, or merely lacking social skills (a little of both, it turns out).

Their madcap, disorienting cross-country journey is intended to ferret out one Dr Wheeler, which whom each has an unspecific yet powerful connection. Along the way they stop where they might chance to find him, colliding with the novel’s other peculiar inhabitants and discovering repeatedly that he checked out a few days ago, two weeks before.

It is hard to believe Wheeler really exists, or that either of the increasingly redoubtable protagonists is the most absorbent towel on the roll – but the sheer beauty of Bainbridge’s prose is addictive, her ability to conjure whole people calling to mind the descriptive power of F Scott Fitzgerald.

Of Harold’s first encounter with the mysterious Dr Wheeler, at a reception to mark Robert Kennedy’s appointment as Attorney General, she writes:

“When [Wheeler] crossed a room he glided rather than walked, head slightly inclined. Sometimes, when speaking, he shielded his eyes with his hand, the way people did when gazing into the distance. It wasn’t altogether contrived, simply that he was one of those fortunate people who made an impression.”

The adventure spans much of the extraordinary period in 1968 between the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King in early April and that of Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy in June. Both men cast long shadows: one character describes his witnessing of King’s killing, while Kennedy’s movements on the campaign trail, mentioned in passing, grow more poignant as the duo journeys toward the fated Ambassador Hotel.

The plot thickens, then elongates, and as California looms the reader wonders whether the pay-off will be forthcoming or if, as they say, the journey is the destination. Then they hit the coast and all becomes clear. It’s quite surprising that it does, because when Bainbridge died last July the novel was not yet complete. Her long-time friend and editor Brendan King prepared the text for publication from her working manuscript, taking into account suggestions Bainbridge made at the end of her life and adding no extra material.

It is a worthy capping to an extraordinary career.

4 / 5 stars: Beryl Bainbridge’s final novel is a subtle masterwork.

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Summer of Love by Katie Fforde

The slipping-into-a-warm-bath experience proffered by Katie Fforde has stood the Gloucestershire writer in very good stead over the course of what, with Summer of Love, is now a 17-novel catalogue.

The lightness and gentle humour of her writing apparently reflect authorial traits: the jacket bio (always revelatory as to how seriously a writer takes herself) reveals that recently, Fforde’s “old hobbies of ironing and housework have given way to singing, flamenco dancing and husky racing. She claims this keeps her fit.” Similarly, there are traces of self-deprecation in some of her characters.

In Summer of Love, Sian Bishop is a single mother who arrives with four-year-old son Rory in a small town in the countryside not far from London. Rory was the result of the briefest of affairs, and has never met his father, who doesn’t know of his existence. Although Sian could track him down, they agreed when he departed for a long stint overseas that it was best to cut all ties, and Sian – whose rare brand of insecure doggedness becomes extremely grating as the story develops – has been true to their accord, raising Rory with the help of her parents.

It is when the pair decamp from London in search of a civilized school that the tale commences and Fforde’s lively, vibrant cast of characters begins to troop in to Sian’s rented cottage. All boxes are ticked: mid-50s Fiona is sage, fearless and seeking love on the internet; prickly, poised Melissa wants to buy the cottage out from under Sian and Rory, and periodically pops in to ponder her future renovation of the “damp, poky” kitchen; James the bookseller is a dark horse with sound romantic potential; and then there’s Gus, Fiona’s son, who hoves cursingly into view in the midst of a dinner party . . .

To say much more would be to give away a game which gets suspenseful (in a soft, relaxing sort of way) about a third of the way in. The quiet, orderly life Sian has created for herself and her son is wrenched wide open, and skeletons emerge, but no one gets hurt and there are plenty of breaks for tea and scones.

Fforde’s books are very much for women, and loathe as I am to use the term ‘chick-lit’, with writers such as the tremendous Jennifer Weiner having disparaged it, I don’t know of a more apt descriptor for her ability to spin amusing yarns that tie up neatly at the end. Her characters have all the flaws, foibles and blind spots of people you know, but the tidy conclusions bear little resemblance to real life, which is where her books find their appeal.

Summer of Love doesn’t push any boundaries, and readers will struggle even to register the existence of some characters; Rory, for instance, is merely a cipher, existing only to serve a larger purpose in the plot. It is neither intellectually challenging nor very memorable, but will provide comfort and distraction to those of a certain bent. Much like a warm bath.

2.5 / 5 stars: Ideal for a winter escape.

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Madeleine by Kate McCann

The McCann family once was ordinary. Kate and Gerry, a Liverpudlian GP and Scottish cardiologist respectively, had a thriving young family and promising careers which had taken them far and wide – from New Zealand, where their relationship evolved from friendship to romance, to Amsterdam, where Gerry advanced his training for a year while Kate cared for their yearned-for firstborn child.

The only blight on their married life had been infertility, which they conquered through the use of IVF. Three healthy children were born: Madeleine, and 20 months later, the twins Sean and Amelie.

It was in May 2007 that the McCanns were whisked from anonymity to international fame and notoriety, when Madeleine was taken from her bed as her parents and their friends ate dinner at a tapas restaurant within the Portuguese resort at which they were holidaying.

Madeleine is Kate McCann’s account of what happened that night, what led up to it (canvassed in brief preliminary chapters covering her early life and marriage to Gerry) and, exhaustively, the period since she last saw her daughter, with particular focus on 2007 and what she calls the “worst year”, 2008, when she and Gerry were named arguido (suspects) by the Portuguese police – who, few readers will not conclude, were woefully inept at best and corrupt at worst.

She recounts the days at the resort before the abduction, and how the group of friends they were with, all of whom had young children, took turns checking on their sleeping offspring during uneventful dinners in the preceding evenings. She remembers comments from Madeleine and other apparently innocuous details that in hindsight may indicate that someone was watching the family and might have entered the children’s room before the night she was taken.

She addresses the criticisms of police and the public; that the McCanns neglected their children by leaving them alone, and that they know more about what happened to their daughter than they have let on. Reading Madeleine, it is impossible to merit any of these misgivings.

As Kate McCann explains, she was not without qualms in telling the story for the first time from her family’s perspective. In particular, she feared that it would unduly expose the twins. In the end, she says, she hopes the book will help prove to her younger children that their parents did everything possible to find their sister, and indeed, the fourth-anniversary timing of publication is designed to trigger another round of publicity and raises funds for the continuing search.

Even for a non-parent, Madeleine makes for inordinately painful reading (and those with children should be warned). It is troubling not only for its well-known horror, but for the clarity with which McCann describes events and their effects on her family, thanks in part to the detailed diary she began keeping shortly after the abduction on the suggestion of a former intelligence officer.

(Later in the book, describing the leaking of the same diary to a tabloid, her words have the air of a resigned shrug: as indignities and betrayals go, it is far from the worst she has received from authority figures.)

Madeleine is a powerful portrait of grief, loss and hope, and a story that leaves you hoping for something greater than the subject’s safe return: that every child should have parents like hers.

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