Today

August 1924. John Conrad arrives at his parents’ country home on the outskirts of Canterbury to celebrate his birthday, where family and friends are also assembling for the last bank holiday weekend that year. His crippled mother has been discharged from a nursing home, his brother drives down from London with his wife and their new-born son. But as these and other guests converge, John’s father collapses.

Today follows the dumb implications of sudden death: the surprise, the shock, the deep fissures in a family slowly exposed through grief. There is also a theft, the beginnings of fraud, and – curiously – laughter, mostly viewed through the eyes of a spinster, Lillian Hallowes – John’s father’s secretary – never quite at the centre of things herself but always observing, a still point in this turning world.

Today is a remarkable debut, an investigation of bereavement, family and Englishness, beautiful in its understatement and profocunf in its psychological acuity.