Our Precious Lulu
By Anne Fine
Bantam £16.99, 255 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

Few writers can convey better than Anne Fine the dangerous currents that ripple through an unhappy family. This unsettling middle-class revenge comedy keeps to form: a book so full of pepper and vinegar that it could dress a salad.

Since childhood, plain-Jane Geraldine has endured the pathological one-upmanship and mind games of her more glamorous step-sister Lulu. Failing to find support from her mother, for whom “precious” Lulu’s behaviour can always be excused, she has coped with her burden by marrying the saintly boy next door and blubbing a lot. But when Lulu announces that she is going to have a baby, as Geraldine has tried and failed to do for years, something snaps.

Full of dark insights, Fine’s novel is as much about the quiet support to be found in a good marriage and the divided loyalties of stepmothers as it is about step-sibling rivalry. A cathartic fantasy about dumping unwanted emotional baggage.