The Swimmer, By Roma Tearne

While some novelists might stand accused of putting style ahead of substance, in Roma Tearne's case the reverse is true. An impassioned and enthused writer, her more involved paragraphs are sometimes in need of a gentle prune, although it's this same expansiveness that lends an appealing authenticity to her work.

Tearne's fourth novel is largely set on the outskirts of Orford, an ancient marsh-bound village close to the Suffolk coast. It's here that 43-year old poet, Ria, lives alone in a cottage within hearing distance "of the soft gasp" of the river. Still mourning the end of a long relationship, and estranged from her complacent and militant brother, Jack, she's in danger of slipping into a state of perpetual melancholy.

It's partly thanks to this self-imposed seclusion that Ria has failed to absorb local news reports of a spate of animal mutilations that has left her livestock bleeding to death in the surrounding fields and paddocks. She also seems strangely unperturbed when a beautiful young man starts taking moonlit swims in the river at the end of her garden. When the visitor becomes bolder and steals into the house to help himself to bread and beer, Ria cooly involves him in conversation. He's Ben, an asylum seeker from Sri Lanka working summer shifts on a nearby farm. Over the next few weeks, the two loners, separated by 18 years, become first friends and then lovers.

While Tearne's narrative power can wax and wane, she comes into her own when elaborating her characters' long-nursed hurts and secret desires. Ben's grief is wrapped up in the horrors of home-grown terrorism and war, while Ria is still coming to terms with the loss of her father and her own failure to start a family. Each of the two lovers' losses are calibrated and measured, but their delight in their new situation is shared. Ria and Ben's bucolic idyll, however, is to be short-lived. Tragedy intrudes, its consequences spreading far beyond the Suffolk countryside. It's at this point that the novel changes direction, becoming a more conventional story about the miseries facing asylum seekers and political refugees.

Despite the eloquently expressed anger of the later sections, we soon start to miss the dreamy love story. It's Tearne's heady evocation of a long hot summer - the mysterious river and its nocturnal swimmer - that really linger long after the more hard-hitting drama has moved on.