‘The house in south Dublin turns out to be a mere staging post in a life lived if not always happily, then certainly with guts and willpower. Bolger’s story spotlights colonial Kenya, where the ghastly lives of settlers, with their pet mongooses and taste for imported English marmalade, are described memorably; 1960s London and provincial England; and – in scenes reminiscent of Colm Tóibín’s The South – the high Pyrenees, with their dry winds and dust. We see too glimpses of lives never lived and destinies unfulfilled, in New Zealand and elsewhere: our futures turn endlessly on pivots, this book suggests, and Eva is more aware than most of the fact that we are tools and not makers of our own destiny.

‘And this in turn means she is painfully aware of the transitory nature of happiness: that is a state to be glimpsed only, maybe, and that for this reason it is all the more precious. Certainly there is little sustained happiness to be taken from her life with her daughter and son: Hazel’s own choices cast shadows over her future; and Eva’s gay son, Francis, is obliged to live as best he can on the edges of a society that will at best tolerate the intolerable.