The Distance Between Us by Maggie O'Farrell

Haunted in the Highlands

Maggie O'Farrell has rapidly established herself as one of our most interesting and popular young novelists. Richly imaginative and unashamedly romantic, she has made a space for herself somewhere between Daphne du Maurier, the Brontë sisters and Frances Hodgson Burnett. This is the third of her seductive novels and quite the best to date.

In her stories, the child is always father to the man, or, more accurately, mother to the woman, since her preoccupations are often sisterly. These are haunting, passionate psychological dramas, full of sensual language, vivid snapshot imagery and quite a lot of talking to the dead. Jane Austen's Catherine Morland would have been delighted to find The Distance Between Us in one of those creaking old trunks, for all that it is an unambiguously contemporary love story about young people who backpack through China and contemplate taking up media jobs in any one of several continents.

Fatherless Jake, son of a single English mother, has been born and bred in Hong Kong, where he feels at home, though he is about to undergo a grim, life-changing experience. Mean- while, in west London, Italian-Scottish Stella, troubled and restless, is destined once again to move on from her job. Both will travel inexorably towards the same small place in the Scottish Highlands, mysteriously unmarked on any map. The ensuing love story between the two is deftly told through cinematic cutting, as it shifts in time and space, carrying a number of nicely told back stories.

There is that of Stella's Italian immigrant grandparents who run a café in Musselburgh with their only child Francesca, who becomes Stella's mother. It's a story that comes complete with a charming vignette of an old-world, south-Italian courtship. There is Jake's hippie-trail mother, whose own life is being lived in reaction to her bleak, bible-black Welsh parents, who have conceived her against the odds of a formidable bolster placed permanently between husband and wife in the marriage bed.

It is through this loveless vignette, along with a lurking resonance of Rochester's mad wife in the attic (in this case, not so much mad as resurrected) and in Stella's vision of a looming, snub-nosed man against rocky cliffs, that O'Farrell achieves her vivid gothic effects.

But the real power of this book lies in the parallel story of Stella and her sister Nina, whose characters are formed through an episode of childhood misfortune and a dark secret shared; two events which turn the girls in on each other and make a hell of their schooldays and early adult lives. In O'Farrell's last book, My Lover's Lover, for all its skillful suspense, one felt that the effects were somehow got with smoke and mirrors. By contrast, this superb story, in which the rescued sister finally becomes the rescuer, has an extraordinary female intensity and authentic emotional punch that reaches crescendos as brave and heart-stopping as those in Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market.

Barbara Trapido's novel 'Frankie & Stankie' is published by Bloomsbury