BITTER ORANGE

(Penguin £14.99) THIS darkly smouldering, desperately sad, superior psychological thriller contains shades of Zoe Heller’s Notes On A Scandal — and that’s a good thing.

It’s 1969 and Frances, an unmarried 39-year-old who has spent most of her adult life caring for her recently deceased mother, is spending a couple of weeks of the summer at a dilapidated mansion, recording the contents of its once magnificent garden for its new owner.

Another younger couple are also living there, listing the contents of the house, and soon Frances is spending every day with them, eating, drinking — and occasionally spying on them through a telescope she has found angled under a floorboard.

Amid the novel’s hothouse atmosphere, Fuller boldly leaves quite a few storytelling gaps as the small inconsistencies, in both the young couple’s account of themselves and Frances’s narrative, accumulate with druggy, intoxicating power.

I was never persuaded by why the couple would want to spend so much time with Frances, but she is an unforgettable creation — dreadful and tragic in equal measure.