ELMET

(John Murray £10.99) DANIEL, 14, and his elder sister Cathy live in a house built in a forest by their ‘Daddy’, a huge, powerful man who makes money in illicit, bareknuckle, anything-goes fights.

The story is narrated by the slender, effeminate and bookish Daniel; Cathy takes after her father, physically and mentally strong and always looking for a fight. The three of them are constantly under threat from the crooked farmer who owns the ground on which their house is illegally built.

In the end, Daddy is forced to take on a Ukrainian giant in exchange for the deeds to the land. The fight is the best thing about the book and genuinely is nail-biting.

For the rest, debutante novelist Mozley is good at creating atmosphere but not at character development or convincing plotting, making her Man Booker long-listing somewhat baffling.

She is guilty of overwriting, too, describing someone as ‘silent as a wolf’. Don’t they usually go in for rather a lot of howling?