Cold Boy’s Wood
CAROL BIRCH
(HEAD OF ZEUS, 352 PP, £18.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.09 • tel 020 7799 4064

Characters in novels are expected to trace some kind of emotional arc; whether a shift from thoroughly grumpy to slightly less grumpy counts will probably be down to a reader’s personal taste. Dan and Lorna are in their later years, so change by slight increments is perhaps to be expected, the volatile transformations of youth being far behind them. Lorna at least has a dramatic past; she wasn’t always the eccentric old tramp who becomes the bane of Dan’s life. Periodically her mind drifts back to when she was involved in radical politics, living in west London with handsome, idealistic Johnny and her daughters, teenage Lily and young Harriet, from two different fathers.