The touching story of a troubled teenage foster child and how sh

Trachtenberg in upstate New York. His sister Natalia was 10. Their mother, whose four older children lived in the Dominican Republic, worked long hours in a factory. Their father had left the family home.

Gaitskill, who has no children of her own, had considered adoption before becoming a Fresh Air Fund host, and in Lost Cat she describes how her relationship with Caesar, Natalia and their mother developed against a background of emotional turbulence: the death of her father, the loss of a pet cat, the breakdown of her marriage.

These experiences became the inspiration for Gaitskill’s latest novel, The Mare. It is her first for a decade and a striking departure from the dark emotional obliquities of her earlier fiction. The epigraph is taken from National Velvet, Enid Bagnold’s 1935 fiction about a 14-year-old girl, Velvet Brown, who wins the Grand National on an inelegant piebald horse.

Gaitskill’s protagonist, Ginger, is a middle-aged ex-alcoholic with a comet-tail of disastrous relationships, who met her current husband Paul, an academic, at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. He has a daughter, Edie, by a former marriage. Ginger is childless, fortysomething, and beguiled by the fact that “the third time we had sex, he said, ‘I want to make you pregnant’”.

There is no pregnancy. They discuss adoption and settle eventually on inviting an inner-city child to stay. Thus Velveteen Vargas, known as Velvet, enters their lives. Velvet is a child on the cusp of adulthood, already better acquainted with the tough realities of life than Ginger, whose sobriety seems to have involved a certain reversion to a state of pre-lapsarian sensitivity. Relieved of the necessity to earn a living, she dabbles in art, feels things deeply, is entranced by nature and hurt by the schoolyard bitching of Paul’s ex-wife.

For Velveteen, whose mother Silvia treats her harshly, preferring her younger brother, Dante, the contrast between Ginger and Paul’s middle-class milieu and her home in