How much of life is spent wishing we had spoken more truthfully of our feelings? To call this dark and difficult emotion regret is too easy; it is rather the sadness of waste: of a failure to communicate with those who mean most to us while we live. Caryl Phillips’ new novel pivots about this point, introducing image after image of failed human relationships: between parent and child, wife and husband, between siblings, between friends. Characters strain to say what they mean, but what their counterparts hear is despairingly misrepresentative of the inner feeling that first kindled the impulse to speak. It opens with the image of a “diminished woman”, who “wants to tell the man that it hasn’t always been like this. She wants to tell him, but to what purpose?&