English Correspondence - Tapa dura

Billed as a "Hotel du Lac for a younger generation", Davey's debut novel is a lean and elegant discourse on grief at the loss of parents and the subtle disintegration of understanding between a married couple. Sylvie runs a small hotel in France with her chef husband, and in five years has exchanged 200 letters with her father in England. The latter's death and the loss of his final letter brings her to a marital crossroads. Although entirely different in context, Davey's novel has the same limpid style as Girl with a Pearl Earring and captures emotional reactions to the smallest nuance as the public running of the hotel divides from Sylvie's intense inner observations. The death of a customer at his retirement party and the awkwardness of Christmas add to her separation from what has gone before. An exceptionally good read.

Sylvie is half French and half English. Since the death of her mother, she has written weekly letters to her father in London. When he too dies unexpectedly, she waits for the letter she knows he must have posted before his death. And as she waits, her carefully ordered life finally begins to unravel. Janet Davey's mesmerising first novel has the deceptive simplicity of a perfect piece of chamber music, or a Vermeer interior. Set in the Meuse - an area of France that is on the way to everywhere but nowhere in itself - it involves a small cast of characters who move around each other in a complex game of emotional chess. Sylvie and her husband own a small hotel. He cooks; she runs it. Their lives are lived in public, as if they are permanently on stage - not ideal if your marriage is crumbling. The death of both her parents crystallises Sylvie's sense that she has made all the wrong choices. But to change anything would bring the whole fragile card tower tumbling down. Brilliantly observed, delightfully witty and beautifully written, English Correspondence condenses all the major questions of adult life - love, marriage, children, grief - into the time it takes to arrange a funeral and discover what happened to a missing letter. It marks the debut of a writer to rank alongside Jean Rhys in the incisive exploration of human desire and weakness.