The Stars in the Bright Sky

The Stars in the Bright Sky, by Alan Warner Jonathan Cape RRP£12.99 400 pages

Bristling with teenage excitement and dread, Alan Warner’s pitch-perfect 1998 novel The Sopranos followed the antics of a group of Catholic schoolgirls in small-town Scotland as they took the excuse of a Glasgow choral contest to run amok. The surprisingly peppy sequel, long-listed for this year’s Man Booker prize, projects “suspicious Manda, calm Kay, fascinated Kyla and timid Chell” – as well as university-educated Finn and her half-French friend Ava – four years forward to 2001, when they go on holiday.

Even at check-in, it’s clear they’re toting as much emotional as actual baggage. At heart, this entertaining comedy of manners is about social mobility. The book asks what’s lost and gained when people slip the bounds of the place in which they grew up. Warner handles the question with subtlety, and it says much about his powers of empathy that middle-class Finn and beer-belching ladette Manda both tug at the heart strings.