The Red House

Mark Haddon is a master of stark narrative insight layered with psychological complexity- and his latest offering doesn't disappoint.

The Red House is a novel awash with the intricacies and cracks in human nature that we have come to recognise of Haddon, a depiction of modern family relationships and the fragile world in which our lives play out.

Detached from the rhythm of their everyday lives, two estranged families come together for a week's holiday in an isolated cottage near the Welsh border. Wealthy doctor Richard and his new wife Louisa form one couple, while haunted sister Angela and her unfulfilled husband Dominic make up the other. Their troubled children add to the cast - provocative Melissa, god-fearing Daisy, action-loving Alex and young oddball Benjy. The narrative dips in and out of each character's perspective, blending slices of consciousness with fragments of other voices - of books, music, letters and ghosts - to create a searing  polyphonic account of ordinary life tinged with the sublime and otherworldly.

Whilst you're unlikely to completely fall in love with any of the characters - except maybe the wonderful eight year old Benjy - you will feel an affinity with these all-too-familiar people as the strands of relationships shift and perceptions change. 

It's a book which ebbs and flows, rooted in the past and dancing on the present. Ultimately, it reminds us of those things that make us deeply human in a modern world.