At sixteen, Sharn is pregnant, alone and ‘wild’. She ends up at Sassafrass, a retreat where people pay to ‘scream their lungs out, take their clothes off and dance like lunatics’. She gives birth to Caitlin and works at Sassafrass for almost four years, until Liam arrives as a guest and he and Sharn fall in love. Liam is attracted to her strength, and she is drawn by his gentle nature and concern for Caitlin. Despite their passion for one another, it is a shaky partnership from the beginning. Sharn is resourceful, unforgiving and tough; Liam is kind, lackadaisical and unemployed.

Sixteen years later, Sharn is, in her own words, ‘not a likeable person’, and Liam has mastered an ‘inability to face up to reality’. Their relationship is withering, hastened by Caitlin’s decision to devote her life to serving Satya Deva, the leader of a faith that promises ‘a new world order of peace and spiritual prosperity for all’. This crisis is the catalyst that drives the plot and forces Sharn, Liam and Caitlin towards a reunion, both physical and emotional, that offers them the slight hope of establishing a relationship of acceptance and trust, of themselves, as much as of each other.

In Blain’s fictional world, families are destructive; at best a collective of wounded individuals, nursing their frustrations and grief in isolation from one another. Her mothers are reluctant, preoccupied or distant, and Sharn and Caitlin are no exception. Both fall pregnant by accident, and both feel their children are burdens. Sharn accepts her responsibility for Caitlin, but, ‘she did not talk to her or comfort her or hold her. She kept her clean. She kept her fed. And she could do no more.’ Sharn’s guilt at ‘how little she had been able to give colours her relationship with Caitlin, who suspects her mother didn’t want her and, in response, has become a ‘polite, good and completely remote’ young adult. Caitlin, as a mother, is awkward, distracted and, seemingly, uninterested. If Blain’s mothers are reluctant, her fictional fathers are either absent, useless or cruel. Liam, for all his kindness, is hopeless -a dreamer whose fatalism results in inaction and avoidance.

While each of Blain’s fictional families is uniquely unhappy, at the heart of the misery is a dark secret and accompanying fertilising silences. In Names for Nothingness, it is the secret of Caitlin’s conception. Sharn buries the truth and, in her subsequent anger, confusion and guilt, believes her deceit results in Caitlin’s silence, both as a child and again when she joins the sect. As Sharn and Liam grow apart, lying to each other, the silence between them also grows: Sharn whispers apologies and confessions above Liam while he is sleeping, and Liam wastes his days watching old silent home movies.

In the press release, Blain explains: ‘I am loath to offer answers, but prefer to tease out questions that intrigue me.’ Blain avoids answers by writing skilfully, with balance, complexity and empathy. She writes of the emotional legacies mothers leave their daughters, without condemning either Sharn or Caitlin. Her depiction of the Satya Deva sect is detailed and convincing, and while she explores some of the murkier aspects of alternative religions, Blain is also careful to give credibility to Caitlin and her decision to join the community. Similarly, Blain portrays the strengths and weaknesses of Sharn and Liam, and of their relationship, without overt comment from the narrator. The combined effect is to render these difficult, unhappy characters interesting and sympathetic while allowing us to wince at each of their failings, frailties and flaws.