IN THE CITY OF LOVE’S SLEEP

(Faber £14.99, 336 pp) WHEN widowed lecturer Raif meets separated museum conservator Iris at a party, something electric passes between them. But then the moment is over and both are left wondering what exactly happened and where their mutual attraction might take them.

This is the acclaimed poet Lavinia Greenlaw’s third novel and it’s a coolly elegant, psychologically acute and frequently unsettling meditation on love in middle-age.

Moving backwards and forwards in time, the fragmentary narrative builds into a portrait of two people whose hurt and defences have made them opaque to themselves — if not to the novel’s omniscient narrator.

The commentary of the latter is very occasionally intrusive; more often, though, it succeeds in striking a balance between irony and tenderness, while the objects with which Iris works — an ice skate, a mirror — serve as resonant metaphors for the hearts and psyches of the wary couple.