The characters in Rose Tremain’s deft new novel are almost all remarkably unpleasant. Not just wicked or selfish, but strangely pathetic, too. In fact, their nastiness is so ingrained and so unignorable that one begins to suspect a degree of authorial malice.

Of course, Tremain is too good to present caricatures: her characters are all amply supplied with motives, credible back stories and the appropriate quotient of human quiddity. But from start to finish, an acrid atmosphere hovers over her every description, and it permeates not just the characters but the main actions of the plot.

Let’s just say it’s not quite what you’d expect from a novel set in the south of France.

One of the characters, Anthony, is an aging antiques dealer. He has a taste for casual sexual encounters with much younger men. His business, having once enjoyed great success, is now failing.

He decides to visit his sister, Veronica, an expert in gardening who lives with her female lover, Kitty, a watercolorist, in the Cévennes. Kitty can’t stand Anthony and his superior, preening ways. Veronica, on the other hand, feels protective toward him, and her sisterly love sparks jealousy in Kitty, who is rather ruthlessly depicted as self-deluding, talentless and emotionally infantile.

But wait until you meet Aramon! A bullying drunk who used to conspire with his father to sexually abuse his sister, the delightful Aramon lives in an isolated farmhouse, the Mas Lunel. Within sight, on land that was inherited and divided between them, lives the blighted sister, Audrun. Older now, she is psychologically scarred and prone to ‘episodes’, but she still has her wits.

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