It’s astonishing that so many writers believe this to be a viable narrative strategy when it so completely undermines the credibility of their fiction. Roberts builds tension with merciless economy, and she has an acute eye for the quotidian regrets of a dysfunctional family — and all to no avail, because Howard is ridiculous. Unreliable is fine; unbelievable is a dealbreaker.

The heroine of When I Forgot (Portobello Books, £12), in contrast, is much more attuned to the subtleties of her crisis than she ever allows us to be. Elina Hirvonen’s debut is the most translated novel in Finnish history. It starts and ends on the same day, outside the same coffee shop, as the narrator Anna assesses a life that has always been defined by a much-loved and psychotic brother. ‘When I was born, the world was already full of Joona,’ she states, matter-of-factly: as the day and the book proceed, Anna summons fragments of a shared past that feels vast, complicated and mostly beyond our purview.

This knotty history is always entangled with Anna’s tortured imaginings of a different, simpler life, and retold versions of a lover’s similarly complex experience. The chronology is clear, but the hierarchy isn’t: the reader ends up feeling like an Anna-logue, hopelessly incapable of sifting this information, and convinced that all of it matters. That the book is so lean — it’s a novella, really — simply makes matters seem even more pressing.

That urgency isn’t quite handled with the same technical virtuosity as the book’s governing scheme, and occasionally Anna’s catalogue of woes can feel a little overwrought, as when a loving text message leads her to imagine squeezing her glass so hard that ‘wine and blood spattered in clear drops across the table’. But Douglas Robinson’s fragile, spiky translation suits Anna’s perpetual crisis so well that it’s hard to object. If anything, it’s a flaw that makes this a still more exemplary first novel: that is, a book that whets your appetite for another one.

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