THE ITALIAN TEACHER

(Riverrun £16.99) TOM RACHMAN is a relentlessly entertaining writer, mixing high-wire ideas with effervescent prose. This follows Charles, a son destined to live in the oversized shadow of his extravagantly talented father, a famous portrait painter and pathological womaniser who, over his lifetime, sires 17 children.

Charles has artistic talent of his own but, after a vicious knockback by his charmingly monstrous dad, devotes himself to a life of mediocrity. He fails at relationships (including with his mother) almost as determinedly as he does at his career.

His once absolute paternal devotion, however, is curdled into something else by the disappointments of adulthood and he plots one last desperate, even demented, attempt to make his mark.

Sometimes, this novel feels a bit like a Jackson Pollock, with its energy all on the surface, but in making Charles the artist of his own misfortune, Rachman asks interesting questions about the tension between legacy and self-determination.