Happy families are, famously, not the stuff of fiction. The Cloughs, who are the subject of the prize-winning poet Lavinia Greenlaw’s second novel, are an ordinary, close-knit, middle-class family who become unhappy, if not intrinsically interesting, when one of them suffers a sudden and violent death.

An Irresponsible Age is set in London and begins in January 1990, at ‘the end of a pugnacious decade and the tail end of a particularly long century’. The IRA bombs, brash young City workers and Poll Tax riots that marked the close of the Thatcher years form the backdrop