One of the more peculiar experiences of my early twenties has been realising that my mother was also once a young woman and is neither infallible nor invulnerable. Coming of age has involved coming to terms with my mother as a person shaped by her own childhood rivalries, resentments, mistakes and discoveries. Daughters seeing their mothers anew and relinquishing their status as dependent, unquestioning children is the terrain of Esther Freud’s new book, My Sister and Other Lovers, which portrays the experience with precision and poignancy.

The book is a belated sequel to Freud’s debut novel, Hideous Kinky (1992), in which five-year-old Lucy and her older sister, Bea, were living with their hippy mother in Morocco at the end of the 1960s. Now Freud has returned to the world of Lucy and Bea with a coming-of-age tale depicting the experiences of adolescence and young adulthood: first loves, work, addiction, sex, grief and motherhood. As in Hideous Kinky, Lucy narrates, but her voice takes on a reflective distance as she matures. My Sister and Other Lovers begins with the girls’ mother leaving their stepfather, a drama teacher who has had an affair with a student. It unfolds over a range of locations. One moment we’re in rural Ireland, the next we’re in a commune in Sussex. Then it’s on to a succession of grubby London flats.

Freud takes an episodic approach, so reading the novel is like dipping in and out of a diary. The effect can be dizzying, but Freud anchors her vignettes in historical detail. Much of this relates to music: there are references to George Harrison and Clash records, Bob Marley and Al