Alone with her father’s dead body, Olive Piper says, ‘I don’t know anything, except what I feel, and how can anyone know more?’ In Susan Hill’s new novel, Olive’s acceptance of the primacy of feeling represents a coming of age. Her maturity is achieved at a cost.

As in a number of her recent novels — Black Sheep and A Kind Man — Hill explores with great economy an idea of the ubiquity of differentness.