Rather like E M Forster, who became more and more famous with each book that he did not write, Adam Mars-Jones enjoyed the distinction of being twice nominated, in 1983 and 1993, as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists without ever having produced a single novel. When in 1993 he finally came up with The Water of Thirst, a fine if fragile work, he fortunately justified these two accolades. Now, after a fifteen-year interval, he has at last produced a successor to that book. Set in the 1950s, it is equally fine but, so far from being fragile, runs to more than five hundred remarkably robust pages.

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