This is an extraordinary book, depressing and enraging by turns. Jenni Fagan’s memoir of her troubled childhood was first bashed out twenty years ago in a white heat, as she desperately compressed the experience of being in the Scottish care system from birth to the age of sixteen. Once completed, the typescript was locked away; she considered it not just unpublishable but unshareable too. It’s hard to imagine how painful it must have been for Fagan, who was named on the 2013 Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, to revisit and revise the narrative.

The result is a highly literary piece of work, the style of which does much to mitigate the distress caused by the content. The opening, an imaginative reconstruction of her mother’s pregnancy and her own birth in a psychiatric ward, draws attention to its fictive approach. Breathless, half-formed foetal thoughts flicker through descriptive passages: ‘I was floating in space./I could stretch./I could yawn./I was translucent.’ Her parents were thoroughly unsuitable (her mother took an overdose at the five-month mark), so at birth Fagan was taken away from them and put in the hands of the state. But it’s hard to imagine how much worse a job her biological parents could have done. Fagan went through various changes of name and several foster families: ‘two adoptions [and] many short- and long-term placements in children’s homes and hostels’. She feelingly describes the hopelessness, the mortification of walking into yet another strange house to meet a set of new faces and to wonder if this time they will be hostile or welcoming.

Any rosy view that foster families have love to spare is dissolved by this narrative, to be replaced by sheer incredulity at the seeming lack of safeguarding afforded young Jenni. How else to respond to the foster mother so filled with rage that the whole family accepts her malevolent treatment