Whatever You Love, By Louise Doughty

Louise Doughty is a courageous writer, willing to explore deeper territory with each book. Family relationships always lie at the heart of her work, but her focus has intensified from group dynamics to the individual psyche. Whatever you Love explores the painfully disturbed mind of Laura, outwardly a conventional mother-of-two, upon whom has fallen that most horrible catastrophe – the death of a child.

On her way to a dancing class, nine-year-old Betty was flung into the air by a carelessly driven Toyota 4x4. The stages of Laura's reaction are movingly charted, through her initial refusal of acceptance, obliviousness to her surviving child, to rage when she finds the driver will receive a derisory sentence. Doughty is excellent at small physical details of relationships with children – their scent and skin texture, memories the body retains even if the conscious mind can banish them.

Laura, however, is primarily driven by the desire for revenge and begins to conduct investigations of her own. But the urge for vengeance is complicated by another of those emotions which can sweep people beyond their normal selves, for her husband David had deserted her before Betty's death for another woman, the bright and cheerful Chloe, and Laura is still tormented by jealousy. She has struggled to maintain composure in the face of David's infidelity but is receiving taunting anonymous letters which increase her emotional fragility.

Husband and wife are brought together over the death of their child and the police proceedings, but will this mean a reconciliation rather than a temporary truce? David confides that Chloe also is unstable, and cannot be trusted with small children. Will he turn out to need Laura more than his second wife?

As Laura learns more about the background of the man who was driving the vehicle, the story broadens and returns to territory Doughty has explored previously, a world of values and networks alien to comfortable middle-class British society. The driver was a middle-aged immigrant worker, living with his extended family on a caravan site. When Laura tracks him down to his home, there seems an unspoken understanding that she is owed a debt.

But nothing is as simple as it might seem. Her child's accident has already caused dangerous undercurrents of anti-immigrant hatred in the small community where she lives. Not only is her conscience awakened, but she learns that there is another child: a small boy in the Toyota when the accident happened. Laura finds that the twin forces of hatred and jealousy can be harnessed and, as the screws of the plot turn tighter, she plans a double vengeance.

Doughty excels at conveying the harrowing grief of Laura's bereavement and her slow emergence into a world entirely changed by the death of her daughter, and skilfully handles a tense and complex plot. This is a powerful portrait of loss and its psychological consequences.