It needs authorial guts to write a novel in which details are shrouded, meaning is concealed and little is certain. Step up Catherine Lacey, and welcome. Her previous novels specialised in confounding the reader, taking the frames of road trip and science fiction and giving them

a good yank. Now she’s gone full religious allegory on us: or has she?

‘Pew’ is the name the villagers in her novel give to a stranger they find sleeping on a pew in the local church.