Reconciliation opens with an intriguing apology by the author ‘for the extent to which my characters fail to resemble their real-life models’. This indicates a central concern of Guy Ware’s novel: namely, how the fiction writer appropriates ‘facts’ to create a story. It’s a preoccupation that informs the book’s highly original narrative structure.

The first part of Reconciliation gives a taste of the sorts of slippages in time and mode with which the reader must contend. The book opens in February 2003, when Martin, the narrator, is in a testy relationship with Holly, an archivist working in Cambridge. The tensions between them worsen