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Tales of love, betrayal and shattered relationships

Ask Again, Yes *****

by Mary Beth Keane

(Michael Joseph, £14.99)

This story of two families riven by a shocking tragedy weaves in the cumulative effects of alcoholism, infidelity, job loss and couples who split after years together. The result is one of the most exceptional novels of the summer.

Ask Again, Yes spans four decades and focuses on two neighbouring families, the Gleesons and the Stanhopes, who leave bustling New York for the quiet suburb of Gillam.

Francis Gleeson and Brian Stanhope are both police officers and everyone assumes that their wives will become friends. Lonely Lena Gleeson does her best to befriend the unstable, standoffish Anne Stanhope, only to be rebuffed. But despite Anne’s hostility, Peter, her only child, and Kate, the Gleesons’ youngest, soon become inseparable friends.

But their relationship begins to shift in their early teens when, one fateful night, Kate and Peter sneak out of their houses to meet on their own. Their parents discover what they have done and a split second of violence ensues. The faultline that has divided the families for years becomes irreparable. Kate and Peter are banned from seeing each other and Peter moves to New York to live with his uncle. Even so, the teenagers cannot forget each other and their families gradually realise that it’s harder than they hoped to sever all ties.

Ask Again, Yes has the makings of a future classic. Keane’s prose is spare and elegant and she writes about mental illness and alcoholism with compassion. This novel serves as a reminder to us all that lives are complicated, that love can overcome age-old rancour and that even at the darkest of times redemption is possible. It’s a remarkable achievement.

Emma Lee-potter

Inland *****

by Téa Obreht

(W&N, £14.99)

Fans of Téa Obreht’s first novel – the Orange Prize-winning The Tiger’s Wife – have waited eight long years for her second. Set against the drought-ridden backdrop of the fin de siècle American West, Inland centres on two strikingly different but equally troubled characters whose lives gradually converge as the novel progresses.

It’s 1893 in the Arizona Territory and Nora Lark, a frontierswoman, waits for her husband to return with much-needed water supplies.

Two of her sons have walked out after a row.

Then there’s Lurie Mattie, former grave robber and highwayman, now an outlawed orphan on the run after killing a man in New York. Lurie makes his way slowly across the desiccated landscape, hiding among the US Army’s Camel Corps as he tries to escape the Arkansas marshal determined to hunt him down. As Lurie treks across the desert talking to his fourlegged companion Burke, Obreht breathes life into the army’s forgotten attempt to bring camels to the American West as pack animals.

Both Lurie and Nora are haunted by spirits: Lurie by the ghosts of his childhood companions; Nora by the ghost of her daughter Evelyn who died of heatstroke as a baby.

As Lurie’s epic desert journey draws nearer to Nora, intrigue builds about how these disparate characters will meet. When they do, it defies all expectations in an incandescent denouement. Set against a backdrop of hardship and saturated with magic and myth, this ambitious novel is a modern masterpiece, culminating in an unforgettable ending. Rosie Hopegood

How It Was ***

by Janet Ellis

(Two Roads, £16.99)

Marion Deacon is not a happy woman. She is stuck in rural Kent in a lacklustre marriage with a decent but staid man, Michael. She has a young son, Eddie, and a complicated relationship with her teenage daughter Sarah (“she wasn’t so much becoming a woman as bursting into adult life like a great pupa. The sheer, swelling physicality of her made me grit my teeth”).

Marion’s discontent leads her to make some unwise decisions, from reading her daughter’s diary to embarking on a misguided relationship. Disaster strikes in the worst possible way and Marian attempts to make amends while maintaining an unruffled façade: “It’s a matter of pride that no one can tell by looking at her… how wounded she is and how much she hides”.

And this is part of the problem of this astute but patchy second novel from ex-tv presenter Janet Ellis. Marian, by her own admission, has “tried to regard everything that happened with a dispassionate curiosity, the way you read the labels in a museum”. She is heartbroken but determined not to reveal it and it makes her an initially unsympathetic character.

Over the course of the novel, she becomes more likeable, but it’s hard to shake off that initial frosty impression. The structure of the book doesn’t help. It opens when all the emotional upheaval is in the past and Marion sits at the bedside of terminally ill Michael, clutching old photos and letters, each a prompt for a memory from the past. So a floundering marriage and fractious feelings are revealed piecemeal, making for a disjointed read. Eithne Farry