Discovering a new author is one of the great joys of reading. I came across Tessa Hadley for the first time only last year and I have been reading through her short backlist with huge pleasure since then. Late in the Day and The Past were two of the best novels I read last year and, although it’s a little early in 2020 to be definitive, I don’t expect to read a better or more enjoyable novel than The London Train this year. Its structure is unusual. What appear to be two largely separate stories, linked through the simple device of journeys between two places, London and Wales, come together cleverly just before the end of the book. The first of the stories, The London Train, tells of Paul’s search for his young daughter who has gone missing in London. Only Children, the second story, tells of a journey in the opposite direction and of Cora’s retreat from an unhappy marriage to her family’s home in Wales.

Hadley’s writing stands within a very strong English tradition. It puts me in mind sometimes of the likes of Margaret Drabble and Anita Brookner. Maybe it’s the settings – the emotional lives of the English upper middle classes with all that turbulence beneath the polite surfaces – or the understated style in which it’s all brought to life. The precise and almost forensic way in which she peels back the layers of apparently unremarkable lives and uncovers the longings and losses beneath is so impressive.