YOUR FAULT

by Andrew Cowan

(Salt £12.99, 208 pp) THE brand-new estate where young Peter grows up has front doors painted alternately in green and burgundy. It’s the Sixties and colour is everywhere, a symbol of ‘a new beginning’. Peter’s family would seem to share the optimism: their kitchen is bright yellow. His Scottish dad has a job for life at the local steelworks.

Yet all is not happy. His much younger Maltese mother — a skittish presence in her paisley patterned trousers — keeps slipping away, and her absences are unexplained. Scuffling with his younger sister, Peter stabs her in the eye, disfiguring her. He is haunted by whether it was an accident for years afterwards.

Meanwhile, their emotionally remote father slowly, sadly, turns to drink.

Written in the second person singular, and with a chapter devoted to each year of Peter’s life from two to 13, this is a terse, bitterly poignant novel about guilt and the art of retrospection. Older Peter tussles with his more innocent, younger self, trying to freeze-frame moments from his childhood and, in doing so, stave off a horror that is about to alter his family story for ever.