LITERARY FICTION MISSING

(Salt £9.99) ALISON MOORE’S big break came when her debut, The Lighthouse, about a bumbling Anglo-German hiker affected by a boyhood trauma, deservedly made the Booker shortlist in 2012.

She’s since trademarked a kind of downbeat English realism, full of loneliness and longing, but shot through with sinister doublings and hauntings.

If her subsequent books haven’t always lived up to her debut, Missing is a triumph. It follows Jessie, a 49-yearold translator of foreign novels, living alone in the Scottish borders.

Her second husband has walked out, while her grown-up son from her first marriage won’t answer messages.

Her new lover, Robert, a social worker, doesn’t balk when she says there’s a ghost in her house — a notion explained by steadily more informative flashbacks to an event 30 years previously, when Jessie took care of her niece, Eleanor.

Moore delivers a stealthily absorbing mix of menace and mundanity in a story of how life goes on — or doesn’t — in the wake of tragedy.