A novel that will make you want to call social services

Nina Stibbe has a way with children. Her first book, a memoir, was a deceptively wide-eyed view of a literary Hampstead family observed in all its turbulence by the teenage Stibbe, working as the nanny. Written as letters home to her sister, Love, Nina won over fellow writers and critics; reviews spoke of a quirky, life-affirming comic genius.

Now she’s written her first novel, and again she has the domestic arena in her sights. Man at the Helm is a wicked anatomising of a dysfunctional family seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old narrator.
Think What Maisie Knew with laughs and four-letter words, plus a touch of The Young Visiters — baroque formality undermined by an engagingly frank view of sex. Henry James meets Daisy Ashford.

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Julie Burchill

Will I ever pee again?

When adults behave like children, the kids grow up fast, and Stibbe doesn’t shirk the destructive effects of parental negligence: Lizzie Vogel, her sister, aged 11, and little brother, enjoy a blissfully privileged life until one evening in 1970 their mother listens in to her husband’s telephone. Cue domestic mayhem. The affluent lifestyle — housekeeper, chauffeur, nanny — is swapped for an unpredictable world. Their mother breaks the news:

‘I want this to be as painless as possible,’ she said, soothingly. ‘Your father and I have decided to split up and get a divorce.’

But the mood changed when my sister accidentally murmured, ‘Poor Daddy.’ And our Mother erupted: ‘Poor Daddy? Poor Daddy is over the fucking moon.’

Daddy sends the chauffeur in the Daimler to pick up his things, and the family, plus labrador, are packed off to a village in the country — where a scatty divorcée and precocious brood are conspicuously unwelcome. Before long the elegant 31-year-old has become, as Lizzie’s sister puts it, ‘a menace and a drunk’, scribbling surreal dramatisations of her life — each a few lines — which she dubs ‘Plays’.