Tricks Of The Light - Tapa dura

This latest offering from the author of The Mistress of Lilliput is perhaps too clever for its own good because it keeps sidetracking from its main story strand - that of a middle-aged woman who passionately loved and painfully lost a flawed adventurer fatally injured in a cycling accident in Turkey. Fell's command of linguistics turns many passages into a pyrotechnic display and she is highly perceptive on middle age. But the storytelling is layered into literary complexity with other characters' stories, including a troubled family in the Scottish Highlands and an advertising executive of changeling nature, destined to become involved with the older woman. A demanding, intellectual read that flits about its different locations and the fault-lines of its participants, ultimately becoming a story of overcoming loss. Its publishers hope for the Orange Prize.

Artist and theatre designer Broom is in her 50s and spending Christmas in the Alps working on a commission for an opera in Leipzig and trying to resolve her love life. Intercut with this story is that of Lockhart, with whom Broom once had an affair and who now must face his own past.