Book review: Getting Colder

A FAMILY held together not by love but by habit are at the uncomfortable centre of this thoroughly well-written novel.

Their habit of continuing as a family is beginning to wane when they are thrown together for a family funeral — the great regenerator of old wounds.

It is a character-driven story into the heart of infidelities and bad choices from the past that have grown rank over time to mature into oddly misshapen love, disappointment and dysfunction. However, instead of being an unmitigated descent into dystopia there is this slow-burn comedy, which is idiosyncratically English.