Old age, memory and a mystery from the past portrayed with affecting conviction

In Three Things About Elsie, Joanna Cannon is faced with a tricky problem that may not earn her much sympathy from her peers. Her previous novel The Trouble with Goats and Sheep is now among the bestselling fictional debuts of recent years. So, how can she possibly follow it? Her solution turns out to be a cunningly successful one: by retaining many of the same elements, but giving them a very different framework.

Once again, for example, we’re plunged into a community that has no choice but to be tightknit (whatever the people in it might sometimes wish) and where a long-buried secret is about to be uncovered.

This time, though, instead of a 1970s suburban cul-de-sac, the setting is a sheltered accommodation home for the elderly in the present day; and, instead of a 10-year-old girl struggling to understand the adult world, the narrator is 84-year-old Florence who, with dementia approaching, is now struggling with that, too.

As a former psychiatrist, Cannon is both understandably fascinated by mental illness and able to portray it with affecting conviction. Not surprisingly, the biggest new theme is old age, which Cannon tackles just as convincingly.

At one point, Florence likens it to “waking up in another country”. But along with the melancholy comes anger at how little control the elderly are allowed to have over their apparently irrelevant lives.

Happily, through all of this, Cannon’s greatest strength remains firmly in place: her ability not merely to create compelling individual characters, but to trace the tangled connections between them in a way that explains how they act — and even who they’ve become.

True, some of her weaknesses are back as well. If a book sets itself up as a thriller — and for much of the time proves a pretty good one — it should probably bowl along a little more quickly, without quite so many paragraphs in which several sentences say more or less the same thing.

In the end, though, the novel is so irresistibly good-hearted, and Florence herself so captivating, that even these flaws feel like only the side-effects of Cannon’s winningly generous attitude to storytelling — and towards her central characters.

Now all she has to do is write a third novel that can follow this one.