The Lost Dog
By Michelle de Kretser
Chatto & Windus £16.99 304 pages
FT bookshop price: £13.59

This is the best novel I have read for a long time. The writing is elegant and subtle, and Michelle de Kretser knows how to construct a gripping story. The Lost Dog is about Tom Loxley, intellectual son of Anglo-Indian Iris, who loses his dog in the Australian bush. He is writing a book on Henry James’s ghost stories, and this novel has both a sense of the uncanny and of terrible things haunting the visible world. Tom is also trying to unravel successive mysteries about Nelly Zhang, a painter who shows, every year, a full-sized photograph of a canvas she has destroyed.