Zohra Dasgupta is a young postwoman going about her rounds in Bromsgrove when, one day, she finds herself delivering a letter to an address she’s never heard of. Through a tangle of bushes set back from the road she discovers a pair of old railway carriages, mouldering and shabby, with two elderly brothers living in them. Zohra is intrigued by the brothers’ shocked reaction to the letter she hands over.

The brothers – Nick and Johnny Greenwood, estranged for years but living side by side – see the handwriting of the sister they believed to have been dead for nearly fifty years. But if Debs wasn’t murdered one night back in 1969, then whose body was found? And can the woman who is now writing to them, declaring her intention to visit, be trusted?

So begins Clare Morrall’s eighth novel, The Last of the Greenwoods. Her 2003 debut, Astonishing Splashes of Colour, was nominated for the Booker Prize. Her books have all been filled with oddballs and outsiders, people living – through their own volition – on the fringes of society. The Last