Whilst reading the first half of this I was convinced I was going to give this five stars but the last 150 pages took such a fast paced, dramatic turn from the lovely, winding narrative that the rest of it felt almost spoiled. The character work was fascinating, especially in the first three quarters where a huge difference between Theo’s perception of himself as a child and an adult was very tangible. There were just so many other ways I had hoped Theo and Boris would reunite, something in the conclusion felt so wrong that something she had created initially seemed to have been displaced. Still, the writing was beautiful, and her musings on grief, obsession and love and loss is consistently lovely.

Ever since the painting had vanished from under me I’d felt drowned and extinguished by vastness - not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances between people even when they were within arm’s reach of each other, and with a swell of vertigo I thought of all the places I’d been and all the places I hadn’t, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and never found, and my painting swept away on the powerful current and drifting out there somewhere, a tiny fragment of spirit, faint spark bobbing on a dark sea.