Two were barking

Julia Blackburn has written about Goya, about the island of St Helena, about the naturalist Charles Waterton, about a talking pig; and she has turned her attention to other strange and various things besides, but she has never written a dull sentence. It is clear from the first few lines of this book that The Three of Us is going to be fascinating. Dark, too. This is a family memoir, from Blackburn’s early childhood with both her parents, progressing through their divorce to a series of ever more difficult triangles featuring herself, her mother and a series of male lodgers.

There was nothing conventional about Blackburn’s parents. Her father, the poet Thomas Blackburn, was: ‘an alcoholic who for many years was addicted to a powerful barbiturate. . . the cumulative effect of the drug combined with the alcohol made him increasingly violent and so mad he began to growl and bark like a dog’.