Narrated from beyond the grave

The White Lie, by Adrian Turpin, Short Books, £12.99, 396 pages

One hot summer day, Michael Salter, 19-year-old scion of a posh Highland family, disappears. When his childlike aunt claims she drowned him during a fight, the family close ranks. No police. No memorial service. No titbits for village gossips. A decade of deceit begins.

Narrated by Michael from beyond the grave, Andrea Gillies’s first venture into fiction after Keeper, her Orwell Prize-winning Alzheimer’s memoir, unpicks the mesh of lies, some white, some not, that entangle the Salters.

Gillies writes with a patrician elegance her characters might appreciate, bringing the closed world of the big house to life with cinematic clarity, the guilt-ridden residents as distressed as the threadbare furniture. The book has a pleasantly teasing quality, stealthily circling its central mysteries, challenging the reader to keep up while it flits between eras. A gripping exploration of the stories families tell about themselves, myths sometimes more potent than the truth.