“He was lying on a varnished wooden board, the top of a boxed-in radiator.”

The opening is slow, Andrew Miller has just turned on the fire to boil a kettle, like an episode of the Archers, quite a lot of dramatic carpentry, stage setting, hanging up the curtains etc

It is 1963. Bobby Darren, Acker Bilk, the last knockings of post war southern England, somewhere in the orbit of Bristol, double pregnancies, a doctor’s rounds, a small farm, Rita’s back story, a magazine from America that paints a different kind of consumer life.

It feels quickly like the kind of book you might be happy to have beside the bed, a comfortable last read of the evening.

Miller writes unobtrusively. There is no me, no I, no  judgmental narrator. No ego. There are shades of Rita, smudges of Irene, a wash of Bill. Each one is allowed to unfold their story, a hand of cards. It is a landscape of a moment we might have forgotten. The style is precise:

“Soho was charming in the snow. A window full of oranges, another of cigars. The strip clubs were just opening, the jazz clubs not yet. At the doors of small cafes, men like El Greco saints stood smoking in their heavy coats, imperturbable, between miracles…”

Come the Boxing Day party and there is a quite masterful portrayal of festivities, bringing everyone and the neighbours together like a closed room detective story or an Agatha Christie assembly of would-be culprits.

The descriptions are very careful, they have rhythm:

“His father was in a paisley dressing-gown. He wore a yellow silk scarf. He had on black leather shoes…” Miller could have wrapped that up quickly with just adjectives but instead he gives it time and meter.

I read one review that said this was a story of two marriages, which is a bit myopic. Far more is the era it captures. In a Booker Prize sense, for which it is listed, not about some far and distant Jamaica, or Sri Lanka or Australia but about those left behind. In good old Blighty. Miller’s kettle boils. Tea is on the way.