Lonely child

Captain Gault, the local Protestant landowner, accidentally shoots an arsonist. Fearing reprisals, he and his wife decide to flee to England with their eight-year-old daughter Lucy.

But, through a series of awful, unlikely coincidences (which Trevor makes effortlessly plausible), they depart, heartbroken, without her, believing that she has drowned.

Lucy grows up almost alone in their abandoned house, keeping bees, reading Trollope. That "great, and unexpected calamity" of her childhood leaves her a broken woman - stricken with remorse, impotent with grief and able to find peace only in associating with what few elements of her past she can track down.

You would be hard pressed to find a more deserving Booker nominee - this is beautiful, delicate, disquieting stuff.

But you would also be forgiven for hoping Trevor's satire hasn't deserted him entirely - it's probably the most miserable book you'll read all year.