The Bass Rock
EVIE WYLD
(JONATHAN CAPE, 368 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • Tel 020 7799 4064

This is Evie Wyld’s third novel, following on from After the Fire, A Still Small Voice (2009) and All the Birds, Singing (2013), and it is considerably more ambitious in scope. Not only is it consciously separated from the Australian/non-British streak in her make-up that fed the imagination that made those books so powerful, it incorporates a triple narrative – and a large cast – that demands constant attention from the reader. I formed the impression on first reading that Wyld had chosen this format to allow a free play between parallel narratives so as to encourage a form of ambiguity and cross–fertilisation, but I also found the break-up of the structure confusing.