Nicci Gerrad: Solace

Irene is the mother of three daughters under 10 and the wife of Adrian, a handsome, charming, out-of-work actor. She teaches dyslexic children. Each day, while Adrian lies in bed, agonising over his failure to be famous and successful, Irene gets the girls up, gets them ready for school, ferries them there, drops the youngest at the childminder, goes to work herself, gets the shopping in her lunch hour, collects the children from the childminder on her way home, tidies the house, cooks and then collapses into bed with exhaustion.

Her only respite is a guilty trip to the cinema when a rare space comes up between lessons.

It's not the kind of life Irene envisaged for herself when she and Adrian married, vowing to be equals and to do things differently from their parents. And, gradually, this life has changed her from the happy, carefree, slim, quick "flame", the "wild flower" she was in Adrian's eyes when they first met, into a pale, skinny drudge.

Almost inevitably, Adrian begins an affair. He falls headlong in love and, after a brief internal tussle, finds the courage to leave Irene and their children. With stinging irony, his no-hope career begins to take off.

Irene is angry and broken, yet for months she hurries on through the daily routine, postponing any real reaction to the devastation. It is only when Adrian and his new lover take the girls on a summer holiday to the other side of the world, leaving her bereft and hopeless, that she stops moving for long enough to break down.

Solace is essentially the story of her recovery from that breakdown, of the slow emergence of a different Irene — not the selfless, careworn wife and mother, but a woman who feels "newly released into the world", who can take control of her destiny and, ultimately, embrace the possibility of loving again.

As always with Nicci Gerrard, the writing is subtle, poignant and tremendously skilful. She brings great tenderness and insight to bear on a story of surviving the pain of everyday life. And within that context, she is not afraid to take on big themes: life, love, death, illness and the inescapable influence of families.

Her characters are complex, thoughtful and mostly convincing, especially self-deluding Adrian and Irene, who is not "poor Irene" at all when she discovers her husband's deception but marvellously, shamingly furious.

As in Things We Knew Were True, there is a "secret ending", in this case a shocking revelation which throws not just certain scenes but the entire novel into a tragic new light.

It sent me back to the beginning, trying, like Irene, to make sense of the past, rereading conversations which were already highly emotionally charged but which take on a heartbreaking new meaning when you know at last quite how much she has lost.

* Penguin, $28