This all fell a bit flat for me. It’s the first book by an author whose later books I’ve loved. I think it was a case of the problem being me rather than the book though. It’s a novel in the form of a series of short stories, all about members of the same extended family, and though this is a format I have loved in other books I never really got deeply engrossed with the characters here. Usually I like it when you think a character’s an idiot seen through one set of eyes, but then an alternative viewpoint makes you think differently. Here I just felt that people were acting nonsensically a lot of the time. But also I’ve picked the book up and put it down over a period of three months rather than giving it a good read, and the world is rather distracting right now, so my lacklustre reaction probably says more about me than the book!