A dark little story about a middle-class couple living a comfortable life in a coastal town in North Holland, but with a catastrophic gap in their lives where their nineteen-year-old daughter ought to be. Loes is a classics teacher, focussing on the order and structure of Tacitus when she isn't trying to impose order on her sandy garden; her husband Nico is the kind of psychiatrist who believes that the job of his profession is to re-equip people with acute mental illness for ordinary life in the community as quickly and efficiently as possible, and is keen to sweep all the psychoanalysts and long-term clients out of his hospital.

Naturally, poetic justice takes a hand, and he realises that he and Loes are like the ice-carriers they heard about on a holiday in France twenty years ago, men who used to bring slowly melting loads of fresh ice down on their backs from Pyrenean glaciers to the towns.

It's difficult to read this without remembering that Enquist is a psychoanalyst in her day job, and that she must have written this around the time that she lost her own grown-up daughter in a road accident. There's a lot of very dark anger here, and not much daylight glimmering through. But the "office politics" of the psychiatric hospital comes over very convincingly. ( )

A couple has lost their daughter, and they are beginning to lose one another, and this novel by Anna Enquist is the story of their seemingly, terribly normal lives and concerns becoming... something else.

Brilliantly written, and with a lyricism that makes one feel as if they're reading a narration of lives being lived rather than written, this is one of those books that is difficult to put aside. Short as it is, there's power in every page and every moment, and the calmness flowing through the language makes the actions and the emotions behind the characters all the more terrible, and all the more real.

For readers of literary fiction, or who read that first sentence of this review and are curious, I have to say: pick this up. I'm so glad to have discovered Enquist's writing, and this book won't be something I'll easily forget.

So, yes, I recommend it. ( )