Jane Harris’s second novel is narrated by a spinster, the elderly Harriet Baxter, and concerns her relationship with a Glaswegian artist, Gillespie, and his family. Like The Observations before it, Gillespie and I presents a disorienting view of a household in which not everything is as it first appears.

Gillespie, we are told, is a ‘forgotten genius’, a painter who didn’t make it into the charmed circle of the Glasgow Boys (that loose alliance of painters who, in the 1870s and 1880s, came closest in effect to some of the French Impressionists). They are personified in Lavery,