Is it courageous or foolhardy to demolish parts of your life to find something more fulfilling, to turn your back on a loveless marriage in pursuit of passion, or to walk away from wealth for a simpler way of living?

Eve Laing, 60 years-old, a celebrated painter, chooses demolition, discarding husband and home as she sets out on the path to a new life and new artistic vision. The backdrop to Nightshade is the London art world and the novel’s story line follows a long night-time journey through the city by Tube and on foot.  I don’t think the author intended this to be a “state of the nation” novel, but to my mind one of its greatest strengths is this particularly vivid sense of place and how it communicates so effectively a feeling of what the UK is like right now: febrile in its uncertainty, fragmented and fractured by inequality and division.

Nightshade is an ambitious novel, preoccupied with sexual equality, gender politics, the posturing and hypocrisy of the contemporary art world, and much more. If that makes it sound stuffy or arid, let me tell you it isn’t. It’s an elegant and thought-provoking read and, especially in its final third, something of a thriller. This is the first novel by Annalena McAfee that I’ve read. I was impressed. And what a gorgeous dust jacket ….