For anyone familiar with French’s earlier novels set in and around the Dublin murder squad, The Wych Elm (or The Witch Elm if you’re reading the American edition) may come as a surprise, welcome or otherwise. At 500 pages, it’s a wordier, baggier book than what came before. More ambitious, more obviously “literary”, it’s a novel in which French liberates herself from the constraints normally imposed by the traditional “police procedural”.

Her preoccupations here are trauma and recovery and the relationship between memory and identity. But above all this is a novel about families. Their secrets, lies and betrayals, but also their power to heal and repair.  If all this sounds dry, it isn’t. French, like all good novelists, knows about pace, plot, and tension and how to work them all to avoid her narrator’s slightly self-obsessed musings becoming dull. Having said that, French’s editor ought to have told her to prune the manuscript hard. It’s far too long and midway through it I found myself longing for her to move things along a little more quickly.