Francine Prose is one of those writers who are well known and respected in the US, but little known here. A fantastically prolific and inventive novelist, she has recently attracted local attention for her excellent ‘how to write’ guide, Reading Like a Writer.

Languid in tone, Goldengrove is a silky lament for a lost childhood; a portrait of a golden American family in crisis. Margaret is a beautiful, talented singer with a handsome boyfriend, Aaron, who her parents disapprove of. (‘He’s got a screw loose,’ says her father.) When Margaret unexpectedly drowns, the family withdraws into cloistered grief. Her mother immerses herself in prescription painkillers, her father in his unfinished manuscript. And 13-year-old Nico, who looks more like her sister every day, embarks on a secret friendship with Aaron – a relationship centred on doing the same things he used to do with Margaret. An eerie sense of the not-quite-right hangs over this novel, and self-conscious echoes of Vertigo (which is name-checked). A moving portrait of grief – and a serene adolescence interrupted.