In Charlotte Grimshaw’s fiction, characters come and go and then come again. Her 2009 short-story collection, Singularity, reacquainted us with old friends from her previous collection, Opportunity (2007). If Singularity was a companion piece to Opportunity, then her latest novel, Soon, is a sequel of sorts to The Night Book (2010), featuring as it does some of the cast from both short-story collections and continuing the travails and power play of New Zealand’s prime minister, David Hallwright, and his beautiful wife, Roza. 

The bulk of the novel plays out at the Wedding Cake, the Hallwrights’ summer residence in an exclusive beach community. The assembled guests include grandees from Hallwright’s National Party, together with Dr Simon Lampton and his wife, Karen, who adopted Roza’s daughter, Elke, when Roza was 16. ‘Blended families are