This Is How, By MJ Hyland

Russell has a "knack for happiness", so his father thinks, but alas his brother Patrick did not inherit this trait and his life is dogged by misfortune. He is dumped by his fiancé, drops out of university, and ends up in prison. It is the unfortunate Patrick who narrates this visceral, deeply affecting tale. He is a mechanic whose toolkit was once the source of fixing damage but will become the means through which the edifice of his whole life crumbles.

Like the young protagonists in Hyland's earlier works, How the Light Gets In and Carry Me Down, the narrator is keen to gain independence, this time from his suffocating mother, and so moves into a boarding house run by Bridget, with whom he becomes besotted. His fellow lodgers include the posh Oxbridge graduate, Welkin, whom he can hear "rutting" through the thin walls.

Patrick's own sad life, however, is so starved of intimacy that even a hand touching his arm, or the sound of his own name, counts as a "happening". As in her earlier books, Hyland beautifully and devastatingly depicts her sympathetic anti-hero's painful craving for closeness.

Patrick's suppressed rage erupts by punching pillows, digging holes in the ground in which to shout how "f*cking stupid" the world is", and by hitting another person with his adjustable wrench which will lead to his arrest. Hyland explores what happens when the mind loses control of the body. Patrick starts sobbing involuntarily in the theatre, pub, toilet, has panic attacks, and persistent nausea. Throughout, his heart thumps "with blasts of hope and fear", as too does the readers.

Hyland, a former lawyer, has a shrewd and convincing eye for the minutiae of the justice (and injustice) system, as Patrick is subjected to the "slow and painful" process of the law. She evokes a cruel, impersonal world regardless of individual suffering. "I don't know why you're so surprised that people don't care about you", one prisoner advises Patrick, another warning him not to be "too soft". To survive, one must become hard and tough.

Causality is a question at the heart of the gripping narrative as Hyland probes not only 'how' but 'why' - whether or not the action at the novel's crux was "intentional". "How could you do this?", beseeches Patrick's mother. But there is no easy answer.

Hyland compellingly patrols the border of normality and self-control, at which a civilised, "decent" person can turn criminal.

Time is of the essence in this poignant novel and the trial symbolically hinges on an alarm clock which Welkin apparently stole. "I can't keep up with life", Patrick laments. "It's too late", is another refrain. He will spend time in prison, yearning for the past and fearful of the future, desirous to "kill time". "I'm always disappointed", Patrick realises, "hen I've got something in my hands I know how to wreck it or not pay the proper attention to what it is I've been given".

This is a compassionate, disturbing novel, tragically showing a human learning to appreciate life only when his own has been incarcerated. This is How builds on Hyland's formidable knack for outsiders: the sense dogs Patrick throughout his life that "I don't belong here" - only when this outsider is most excluded will he learn to feel at home.