Disquiet

by Julia Leigh

Faber £9.99,

128 pages

FT Bookshop price: £7.99

Disquiet is magnificently, uncompromisingly austere. This novella of a little more than 100 pages stews in an atmosphere of dread and, well, disquiet. The plot, such as it is, is severely attenuated. The characters are mere smudges of personality, whom we only ever get to see through the distorting optic of trauma and grief.

A woman named Olivia arrives at a large house in the French countryside with her two bedraggled children. Olivia is Australian, though we are never able to work out whether this is significant, and she is fleeing an abusive husband Down Under. The house turns out to belong to her mother, who lives there with her son Marcus and daughter-in-law Sophie.

Sophie spends the entirety of the narrative nursing the tiny corpse of her stillborn baby. And the scenes in which she treats the inert bundle as if it were a living being are among the most powerful in this deeply unsettling book. Julia Leigh is clearly an unusual talent.

Jonathan Derbyshire