Liardet is a masterful observer of the telling minutiae of life, from gestures and speech to the familiar things that surround us and from which we draw meaning. At the start of the book Ellen wonders at the easy authority with which other people can get Pamela to obey it is not long before she, too, can instil obedience with just her tone of voice.

She’s also good on the changes time wreaks in childhood, both on the child, who alters from one month to the next, and on the parent, who grows with them. Liardet describes beautifully the almost animal quality of that feeling, called up by the smell of a child’s neck, the curve of a chubby arm, even an outgrown dress. This is a book suffused with parental affection: fierce, physical and almost inexpressibly tender. “We began to mill barley flour along with the wheat, and then we had to mix potato flour with the barley, and Pamela was still with us.” Although largely preoccupied with the war years, the novel ends in 2010, and as well as being a deft social history, it is a love story – that of the love Ellen discovers in herself for the little girl and its relationship to her own poverty-stricken childhood in the 1920s and 30s how it changes them both, and what it costs. The party includes a small, unaccompanied child, Pamela, whom Ellen volunteers to look after until her parents can be found, but as the war progresses the days turn to years. It is 1940 and a busload of bombed-out civilians from Southampton has arrived in the village of Upton, where Ellen Parr and her much older husband Selwyn, a miller with whom she has what’s described as a mariage blanc, are helping to find them beds for the night. The writing is often dazzling – a child’s voice is “clear, piping, like a twig peeled of its bark” – and this, too, lifts what might have been a sentimental story into different territory altogether. From the off, Frances Liardet’s second novel, published 25 years after her first, distances itself from nostalgia and insists on its own terms. D omestic stories of women’s lives in wartime are common in genre publishing but rarer in literary fiction.

Frances liardet books