Sweet Tooth, by Ian McEwan

‘I’m trying to help you, Serena. You’re not listening. Let me put it another way. In this work the line between what people imagine and what’s actually the case can get very blurred. In fact that line is a big grey space, big enough to get lost in. You imagine things — and you can make them come true. The ghosts become real. Am I making sense?’

You can’t say the heroine of Ian McEwan’s latest novel wasn’t warned. Serena Frome is a clever, pretty young woman who led a sheltered childhood as the daughter of an Anglican bishop: ‘We grew up inside a walled garden, with all the pleasures and limitations that implies.’

Though a mathematician at university, Serena is a voracious reader of novels, which leads her to Solzenitsyn, which leads her to a vociferous and unfashionable anti-communism, which leads her to a tap on the shoulder from a recruiting don, who leads her to bed, and thence to a very lowly role in the bureaucratic end of the British secret service in 1972.