Signs of Life, By Anna Raverat

The consequences of an ill-advised relationship is the stuff of many a heated psychodrama. In Anna Raverat's highly readeable debut, a woman tries to piece together her memories ten years on.

Rachel is seemingly content with her boyfriend. Their shared happiness is "like warm blue water – very wide, and very deep". But when Rachel is pursued by a work colleague, she feels unable to resist his more raffish charms.

Raverat alerts us to disaster from the start, prefacing her story with a Sylvia Plath quote: "It was a relief to know I had fallen/ and could fall no further."