This is a relentlessly interior, almost claustrophobic, novel. It takes the reader into the mind of a woman not just haunted by feelings of guilt and shame but beset by them. She torments herself with relentless self-examination, crueller than any that the lawyers or the media can subject her to. It is not the legal action or the public judgement that tears her apart (though they play a role): it is her opinion of herself; the erosion of her confidence in the most innocuous actions or decisions. A lifelong perfectionist, Anna is unable to get past having made a mistake. Rationally, she knows that it was one that any of her colleagues could have made, and that doctors make workplace errors like anyone else, but her internal voice of censure is louder than her voice of reason. ‘You so rarely made mistakes when you were young, Anna,’ her concerned mother tells her. ‘You were always so careful, so painstaking. Perhaps that is why this has hit you so hard.’

Gradually, it becomes clear that there is another, more private grief that is disturbing Anna’s equilibrium, and contributing to the slow failure of her marriage: three years ago, she suffered a miscarriage. It is a loss that she alone mourns; her husband was ambivalent, at best, about the pregnancy. As her mediation date approaches and Anna grows increasingly distant from the world, Paul draws nearer to it, seemingly seeking respite from his wife’s cloudy self-absorption. He may or may not be having an affair with a younger colleague. Significantly, the date of Anna’s case coincides with the announcement of an award for which he has been nominated. For Anna, his success throws her failure into sharp relief.

Dissection is not a cheerful novel, but it just escapes being overwhelmingly grim. Halloran is a deft mistress of the domestic, and there are some beautiful scenes of family life that glow with human warmth. Some are understated: an early scene of husband and wife companionably, wordlessly, folding the washing before the nightly television somehow works as an intensely comforting tableau. Others are transcendent, strong enough to momentarily eclipse the burgeoning despair that underwrites everything. Waiting at the school gate, Anna reflects: ‘Her children stand out from the rest – their hair shinier, their expressions wiser, their smiles more endearing – and for a moment she is content. At that moment it feels enough.’ Anna’s relationships with her mother and sister are similarly affectionate, if occasionally shot through with irritation. It is the poignancy of the relationships that makes Dissection so affecting: the reader is witnessing the dismantling of a picture-perfect life, all triggered by one easy mistake. Anna’s situation is tragic – in the classic sense of the word – because she has so much to lose.

There is much material for reflection here: not just on relationships and the role self-perception plays in who we are but on the wider social issues illuminated by Anna’s dilemma. Halloran illustrates a range of issues in contemporary medicine. Most importantly, she constructs the perfect GP (she asks thoughtful questions; she considers each patient’s symptoms in a wider context; she genuinely empathises), then turns her into a cynical, disillusioned automaton. The scenario is the logical extension of where our lofty expectations of doctors and our shrill insistence on accountability (regardless of intent) can lead. ‘Somehow the profession has evolved to a situation where mistakes are intolerable.’ Dissection shows that blind intolerance of mistakes not only crushes unfortunate individuals like Anna McBride; it replaces excellence with careful mediocrity.

This is a meticulously careful novel, not at all mediocre.