Sadie Jones's first novel, The Outcast, was a devastating portrait of family damage in a postwar climate of numbness and repression. An unusually confident debut, it combined elegant, understated prose with a raw emotional charge to become that rare thing: a critically applauded bestseller. It's a hard act to follow, and while her second novel again examines love, duty, shame and violence against the backdrop of the 50s, it widens out from the domestic war zone to military conflict in Cyprus. Small Wars is commendably ambitious, but also a thinner, more mannered work than its predecessor. It strips away the social codes and agreed lies of army, family and marriage, but finds little behind them.