The Beacon, By Susan Hill

If any ordinary writer were caught repeating odd phrases, ones that jangled on the ear throughout a novel, it would usually be a matter of bad editing and best forgotten. But when a writer with the talent of Susan Hill does the same thing, in a novel as pared down and bare as The Beacon, it has an almost subliminal effect. Twice, a married couple are "happy as children". May has a "pinched face" – as a hopeful child and still, later, as a frustrated spinster. She believes, initially nonchalantly, and then more sadly, that marriage would only mean "exchanging one house for another... one lot of chores for another". Her mother's dead body shrinks into its bed as, over the hours, as May remembers, it decays...

No image is wasted in this haunting short novel. The Beacon is the name of the house in which Colin, Frank, May and Berenice Prime grow up – an uneventful childhood, they believe, in which "there were no really bad memories and that was important". But a beacon can both guide ships home and lure them on to the rocks – and this is what it does to the Primes.

The novel is mostly set in May's orbit. It is her voice we hear as she observes the passing of the seasons around the crumbling northern farmhouse and takes on board the deaths of first her father, then her mother; "the tightening of the threads that bound her here [and] the freeing of them." But it is, paradoxically, the absent characters who have the most presence in the novel: the mother, whose death and funeral bookend the story; and Frank, in London, whose brutal betrayal, in the form of a trashy misery memoir about his abusive childhood, wrings a real trauma out of this unremarkable family history.

Frank's book is "The Story of One Boy's Brutal Childhood" – and, as far as any of his siblings can remember, it is a complete fabrication. But his lies contain echoes of May's past; "the terrors" she experienced at university. "The spirit of it [is] true," believes Frank. Is it?

The Beacon raises more questions than it answers: about guilt and responsibility; about whether one can ever really escape one's role in a family; about who owns the truth; and about what it means to write "the truth" down. Readers will find that the novel stays in the thoughts long after it is finished – its images and ghosts whistling around the mind like the wind around an empty farmhouse.

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