A good copy is invisible; a better copy swallows its original whole. Few are more keenly aware of this sleight of hand than Grace Inderwick, caught on the precipice of her aunt and uncle’s reluctant charity after the institutionalisation of her parents. As a panacea to her isolation on the family’s crumbling Oxfordshire estate, Grace develops a knack for forgery, cloaking herself in others’ art like a second skin. Her expertise – and her Achilles heel, face-blindness – is brought to the fore when a letter arrives from Saint Helena claiming that her cousin Charles, long thought to have perished at sea, is alive and ready to take the mantle as heir to the Inderwick fortune. The man who arrives looks like Charles, acts like Charles, and is warmly embraced by her aunt as though he were Charles. Yet the question remains: is this truly Grace’s cousin, or someone entirely new?

In a triumphant return to form by Dylan Thomas Prize-longlisted author Nell Stevens, The Original is an exquisitely plotted puzzle-box of a novel, by turns coy and uncannily sharp as the story circles around this central question, inciting doubt. As in her debut, Briefly, A Delicious Life, Stevens demonstrates a deft command of narrative structure, layering dramatic beats chapter on chapter towards a polyrhythmic climax. Clearer still is her proficiency for coaxing vivid, intimate imagery out of the smallest details: a brushstroke, a handshake, or a fistful of cash. Where dialogue alone may buckle, Stevens’ rich prose gives dimension to a portrait of some of history’s marginalia, illuminating a far more complex relationship between authenticity and deception than anticipated. Rather than cleave real from fake, The Original invites us to do something altogether more unusual and ask who benefits from telling them apart?