Nicola Long is a few years out of art school when she comes across an archive containing a dead sculptor’s letters to a friend. The sculptor, Donna, was about her age when she wrote them and in similar circumstances: broke, disenchanted but convinced – or determined to be convinced – that being a sculptor is right. This is not a novel of inspiration and rapture. It’s about a more recognisable kind of creativity – frustrating, capricious. There is no impulse in the novel not accompanied by some kind of difficulty. The tone is chirpy and playful, the prose is light and delicate, but at the book’s heart is an exasperated lament for an art world lathered in privilege, flattery and cliché.

The Last Sane Woman begins in the Feminist Assembly, a tired institution based on the first floor of an office block in Lower Marsh. Nicola is there out of frustration. She wants, she tells the archivist, ‘to read about women who can’t make things’. It’s the physicality of making that’s important here. She is interested in the ‘blunt difficulty of being faced with a mass’. The archivist eventually presents Nicola with a cardboard box of Donna’s letters, written several decades earlier.

Donna, it turns out, was an absolute hoot, exuberant and endearingly frazzled. Her anecdotes are a riot of boyfriends and faux pas. Regel has a good ear for a sweetly dated turn of phrase: Donna is forever getting in ‘such a tizzy’. But as entertaining as the letters are, a