Descent

This acutely funny, intelligent and unsettling novel charts the trajectory of a woman's life and a couple's relationship during the last decade of the 20th century. Against a backdrop of the seismic nineties, and framed by the Lockerbie air disaster and the attack on the twin towers, it's the story of Genevieve O'Dowd, a strangely unaware psychiatric nurse, a wife, mother, daughter, who's trying to keep a whole lot of stuff airborne while things fall apart, inside and out. Her husband Mark is a filmmaker, usually absent, on small-budget art films (The Snow Queen) in out of the way places.;But as his career takes off, and star-vehicle big budget movies beckon (Hans Andersen can always be upscaled), her life stalls on babies, breastfeeding, builders. This is her narrative, addressed to him, trying to make sense of their lives and the forces - external and internal, family history and genetics, ambition and domesticity - which pull them apart. Her work, which drives her nuts but keeps her sane, her anarchic friend and colleague Sid, and the sad, crazed women in their charge provide a hilarious, heartbreaking backdrop to a world going off the rails. Veering between farce and tragedy, and set in London and on various flight paths and film locations around the world, this tale of marriage and mortar, love and lobotomies, DNA and denial is a dazzling debut novel from a talent to watch - unputdownable, funny and piercingly sad.