THE TRICK TO TIME

(Viking £12.99) KIT DE WAAL is fast emerging as a novelist who is not afraid to tell the sorts of stories flashier writers might overlook. Her Costa book awards-nominated debut My Name Is Leon was told in the voice of a mixed-race, eight-year-old child separated from his beloved younger brother after he is taken into care.

This second novel is more harrowing. It’s the story of an Irish lass, Mona, who leaves for Birmingham as a young girl.

When we meet her in late middle-age, she lives alone, designing the clothing for handmade wooden dolls, many of which are used to console the mothers of stillborn children.

The chain of events that have brought her to this point is revealed through a series of flashbacks that flit between rural Wexford in the Sixties and urban Birmingham in the Seventies, at the height of the IRA mainland bombing campaign.

Perhaps de Waal piles on the tragedy a little too heavily. No matter: she is excellent at detailing the quiet, awful currents that a person can carry with them all their life, and the novel’s ending will leave you reeling.