Rupert Thomson’s protagonists are rarely ordinary. Never Anyone but You (2018) was a lightly fictionalised account of the wartime adventures of the Surrealist couple Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. Katherine Carlyle (2015) centred on a scholarly teenage girl whose desire for self-understanding takes her on a solitary journey across Europe and on to the Arctic. Secrecy (2013) was based on the life of the Baroque sculptor Gaetano Giulio Zumbo. Thomson’s fifteenth novel, Dark Is the Morning, unfolds in one of his customary lush settings: the southern Italian region of Abruzzo, on the Adriatic coast. Rather modestly, however, the principal narrator, Gino Albanese, works in IT for the supermarket chain Lidl, while his wife, Franca, has a job in car insurance.

It’s well known locally that Gino, in his mid-twenties when most of the novel’s action occurs, has a troubled past. From his teenage years onwards, he tells us, he had a ‘determination to obliterate’ himself. He stole vodka ‘for a dare’ and wrote off his dirt bike on a flyover. There was a stay in a psychiatric hospital. The worst, though, seems to be behind him. When he reunites with Franca, his forthright former schoolmate – she declared at the age of nine that she was going to marry him one day, although the interest was never really reciprocated – he sees ‘a chance to turn my life around and make something decent of myself’. 

The novel opens with Gino looking back on these events from a less happy time. ‘It had all started so well,’ he informs us. We know that something is going to go dreadfully wrong, but we won’t find out what until Thomson, with considerable expertise, has built up a lot