Rachel Cusk is a deft hand at dissecting the social and domestic; laying bare the subconscious rhythms and patterns of human interaction. In Arlington Park, a novel which paid a kind of homage to Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway, she traced the web of interactions between the denizens of a well-off English suburb over 24 hours, concentrating on the experiences of the women, most of them at-home mothers.

Here, she delves further into the domestic realm by concentrating on one family over a year, the Bradshaws: three brothers, their partners and children, and their ice-cold elderly parents. At the centre of the book are Tonie and Thomas. She has been offered a promotion ‘too good to refuse’ at work, moving from part-time to full-time; he has quit his job for the domestic realm, with the new hobby of mastering the piano.

Their families are doubtful about their decision (‘A man isn’t a man if he’s in the house all day’), but as time passes, Tonie grows used to her renewed sense of autonomy and Thomas enjoys his new intimacy with his daughter – even as they each experience twinges of jealousy and loss as a result. But will it last? What unseen damage might be done? In a series of evocative vignettes, Cusk cleverly questions the roles we play and the extent to which they are governed by expectations.