The Devil’s Music

While his parents argue over whether or not to send Elaine away, Andy sleeps beside her cot each night, keeping guard and watching as his mother – once an ambitious, energetic nurse – withdraws into her private, suffocating sadness.

Knots keep treasures safe, Andy’s rope-maker grandfather tells him; and, as he listens to stories of the great Harry Houdini, and learns how to tie knots with names like the Carrick Bend, the Midshipman’s Hitch and the Monkey’s Fist, young Andy dreams of becoming an escapologist too. Then a young painter seems to call Andy’s mother from the grief in which she is lost. But one day at The Siding – the old railway carriage that serves as the family’s seaside retreat – Andy is left in charge of his baby sister on a wind-chopped beach where he discovers that not all treasures can be kept safe forever.

Three decades later, when his father dies and his other sister calls him home, Andrew returns to The Siding, the place where his life first unravelled. Looking back on the broken strands of his childhood, he tries, at last, to weave them together, aided by his grandfather’s copy of The Ashley Book of Knots and the arrival of a wild-haired, tango-dancing sculptor – a woman with her own ideas about making peace with her past.

In this skilfully crafted first novel, Jane Rusbridge sublimely captures the essence of a 1950s childhood lived against a backdrop of “beige linoleum and the thick spread of red polish on the front step … Bakelite door handles, dark as chocolate ... the float and slide of pale blue Formica.” A novel of such calibre whets the appetite for more. Roll on Rusbridge’s next one.