Not-so-sweet 16

I like novelists who don’t try to do everything in their novels, but just to do something well. This is what Francesca Segal achieves in The Awkward Age, published four years after her book, The Innocents, won the Costa First Novel Award. She takes six characters — widowed, middle-aged Julia, her teenage daughter Gwen, her grandparents-in-law Philip and Iris, her new American boyfriend James, and James’s teenage son Nathan — and plonks them in sturdy houses in Hampstead, sets the clock, and lets the story play out. Gwen and Nathan are now forced to share a dwelling. Like a good piece of Bach, what unfolds has an inevitability to it but manages also to be surprising at every moment. Segal has an uncanny ability to climb into the mind of each character and show us convincingly exactly what he or she would think, say and do.