Drowning Rose By Marika Cobbold BLOOMSBURY, £11.99 Order for £10.89 (free p&p) from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030

Romance flirts with dark depths

Since her popular debut, Guppies for Tea, Swedish-born Marika Cobbold has established a reputation for astute and acerbic romances. In her seventh novel, she examines the consequences of a girlhood tragedy. If the subject matter is not cheery, it is lit up by offbeat wit and charm.

Eliza Cummings has never recovered from the guilt she feels over the death of her best friend, Rose, who was found drowned in a school lake. Having shelved her ambitions of becoming an artist, Eliza now works as a ceramics restorer at the V&A, fixing pots as her own marriage crumbles. But one December night, she receives a phone call from Rose's father – a voice that takes her back 25 years, to the night of the accident – inviting her to visit him in Sweden.

It is with some trepidation that Eliza travels to snowy Gothenburg to confront the man she has spent a lifetime avoiding. Here, in a fairy-tale house of "honey-wood" floors and blazing stoves, she is forced to share her memories of Rose and their last days together. Frail and fading, Ian intimates that he has been visited by his daughter – or at least by her otherworldly presence – and is anxious to make amends. For the penitent Eliza, his forgiveness signals the road to recovery, and even the possibility of a new love life.

Alternating between past and present and England and Sweden, Cobbold introduces us to the closeted world of the Lakeland Academy for Girls. Among Rose and Eliza's classmates is scholarship girl, Sandra Cassidy, a heavy-set suburbanite with good reason to resent her peers' coltish charms and superior wardrobes. Excluded from the Princesses' inner circle, Sandra starts to plot the kind of histrionic revenge that could only be cooked up in the head of a hormonally-compromised teen.

A dextrous storyteller, Cobbold knits together Eliza's hysterical past and a more conventional drama about finding Mr Right. Central to the schoolgirls' fantasy life is the Nordic folkloric figure of Nacken, a beautiful naked boy with a "tumble of dark hair" and a fiddle who is said to inhabit Sweden's lakes and rivers. It is Nacken who proves instrumental in luring Rose to her watery grave.

A novel about growing up with remorse and guilt, this very readable psychodrama flirts with the more gothic expressions of loss. With astringent insights into the female psyche, Cobbold is at pains to show how even the "highly breakable" can be rendered "useful and beautiful" once again.