Flights have been cancelled due to heavy snow, so Tom is driving from Belfast to collect his son Luke from his university lodgings in Sunderland (in North-east England) to bring him home for Christmas. It’s a slow and treacherous trip, where Tom’s only companion Is the voice of the satnav. In this liminal space, where ‘everything feels intensely strange as the present slips into the silent place where memory and consciousness filter into each other to make something new’, we follow Tom’s thoughts: thoughts about his father, his wife, his children, particularly his eldest son, Daniel.

Tom is a professional photography, and his musings on this art form are peppered throughout the narrative, which is written in a stream of consciousness style to great effect.

‘People don’t understand photographs. They think they always freeze the moment in time but the truth is that they set the moment free from it and what the camera has caught steps forever outside its onward roll. So it will always exist, always live just as it was in that precise second, with the same smile or scowl, the same colour of sky, the same fall of light and shade, the very same thought or pulse of the heart. It’s the most perfect thing that sets free the eternal in the sudden stillness of the camera’s click.’

This book is a meditation on the challenges of parenting, how we all think ‘there has to be a way of loving your child that gets it right, helps them in whatever way they need but doesn’t do their head in’, because ‘it’s one of the paradoxes of parenting that most of the time things work best when space is offered and there’s no surer way of sending your children spinning into some far-off orbit than to try and hold them tightly inside your gravitational pull’. Anyone who has faced the challenge of parenting a teenager will relate.

And it’s about always being open to learning new ways to make a marriage work; for example realising that ‘being married to someone and however close you are doesn’t entitle you to own their memories or be part of their story before you met.’

Ultimately, this novel is about grief. How can a parent carry the all-consuming grief, guilt and bewilderment that accompanies the loss of a child? It is heart breaking, but not without hope.