It’s a family affair in Carolyn Parkhurst novel Harmony

This new novel looks at a family where one of the children has a behavioural disorder and comes at a time when as many as 15 per cent of American children have been diagnosed with ADHD, says Liam Heylin.

PDD-NOS is one of the many acronyms cropping up in the medical records on 13-year-old Tilly at the centre of this most engaged and engaging of books. Her mother has wrestled with an alphabet soup of ADHD-type designations and the reference to her child being on the spectrum.

Looking for diagnosis, or at least identification, there is also a resistance to the reductive tendency of such lettering.