The Stopped Heart by Julie Myerson, book review: Lust, loss and longing in a terrifying family portrait

Myerson is back on form with this dual narrative of two women who inhabit the same house, 150 years apart, and somehow bleed into each other's lives

Taking us to the precipice: Julie Myerson (Rex Features)

Since her 1994 debut, the partially autobiographical Sleepwalking (about an abusive father-daughter relationship), Julie Myerson has carved out a reputation for novels that combine a modern gothic sensibility with a forensic eye for the complexities of human sexual behaviour.

More recently she has turned to non-fiction, most controversially, in 2009 with a book about her son's addiction, The Lost Child: a True Story. For a time it seemed her fiction had got lost. But now she is back on form with this dual narrative of two women who inhabit the same house, 150 years apart, and somehow bleed into each other's lives.

Mary Coles and her husband, Graham, move to a cottage in the country to see if it is possible to rebuild their relationship after a family tragedy. We sense the house has other occupants, as the narrative cuts between the couple's paralysing grief and the extended family who once lived here.

In a parallel storyline set 150 years ago, Eliza, the oldest daughter, recounts how her family took in a red-haired stranger, James Hix, who colonised their affections (especially the women of the family) but remained an enigmatic presence.

As the two plots close in, you realise that they are both about abduction, the cruelty of sexual obsession, and the impossibility of keeping children safe. The Stopped Heart is a terrifying ghost story. In the end, it's the modern story that devastates.

No one writes about the sticky physicality of small children better than Myerson. Or of the emptiness of a landscape where a mother "can lose the one thing you were living for in a space of one quick, blameless and unremarkable afternoon".

The book is shot through with memories of abducted children (from April Jones to Madeleine McCann). And yet it is not mawkish or sentimental. There is hope, greed, anger, compassion. As Graham is distracted by the problems of his teenage daughter from a first marriage, Mary finds herself romantically drawn to a neighbour. Were there cracks in her marriage before? What sort of person can let themselves love again after the worst thing has already happened?

As readers, we often pore over the faces of parents in high-profile abduction cases and wonder how we would cope. Myerson has taken us to the precipice and made us look over.

Jonathan Cape, £12.99. Order at £10.99 inc. p&p from the Independent Bookshop