READING IDEAS FOR THE WEEK

The Ophelia Girls by Jane Healey, Mantle, £8.99

This memorable novel from Jane Healey is as though a photographer – a mother, or lover – stands mesmerised by the sight of a girl whose youthfulness is timeless and whose innocence feels sensual. Across different chronologies, both photographers – Maeve’s mother and her lover – find themselves lusting after an alluring girl who they cannot, or should not, have. Between the summers of 1973 and 1997, the photographs adjust their camera lenses and feel the weight of trying to record her – the figure of their desire – as she is/was. Beautiful, sad, aching.

Healey writes across two timelines – one, the 17-year-old daughter Maeve, in remission from cancer, and the other, the mother Ruth, whose return to her father’s house in the country resurfaces memories from her last summer spent there in 1973.

Ruth’s childhood friend Stuart, an esteemed war photographer, comes to live with them for the summer and drudges up “the Ophelia Girls” drowned in Ruth’s past. Stuart intimates both timelines – first in Ruth’s life and later in Maeve’s.

This is a book about memory, about the visceral act of capturing something “that (can) not be spoken or heard or understood”.

Healey’s depiction of motherhood, girlhood and sexual awakening is astute and makes the dialogue feel charged and encompassing. The novel’s dual protagonists are a mother and daughter whose summers closely parallel one another. Like her mother, Maeve has a tense relationship with their father, feels at odds with her sexual longings and has had an intimate encounter with Death.

Toward the denouement, both women are forced to face their past by acknowledging the ethereal, unreliable memories that shape their present realities. Selfish and unkind, the egocentricity of Healey’s characters unmakes them – their relationships shallow like the stream in the woods behind Ruth’s country manor, evaporating slowly with time under the sun.

Healey’s The Ophelia Girls is written for a mature audience. It questions what it means to be in control and might leave readers feeling purposely uncomfortable with Stuart as he blurs the line between naivety and consent. This novel explores the boundary between love and infatuation – that “treacherous, gossamer, liquid” moment “when a girl decides to give herself to the river”.