IF, THEN

by Kate Hope Day (Doubleday £12.99, 272 pp) KATE HOPE DAY is a former associate producer at HBO and, for all the merits of her debut, you do wonder if she conceived it in the way that one might a pitch for TV.

No one in the small Oregon town of Clearing thinks the volcano that overshadows them will ever blow, except for Mark, a research scientist at the local university.

Yet Mark is also haunted by visions of a man he thinks might be another version of himself, a ragged vagrant who lives in a tent in the woods, while his wife, an ER doctor whom he barely sees, is experiencing similar disruptions in reality that speak to her deepest desires.

Hope Day has a lot of sly, stealthy fun with time-bending and parallel universes, but she also has serious things to say on urban paranoia, climate change and the atomised nature of modern life.

However, her characters are constrained by the overarching plot that, in the end, delivers rather less than it promises.