Central character Madelaine, the most troubled of the group, is the classic unreliable narrator. Her perspective dominates the first third of the book. When her husband first takes the wheel of the narrative, he brings with him the certainty that things are not what they seem. The trail has already been laid for this creeping sense of the ‘not quite right’, which swiftly escalates. (Madelaine shops while her children sleep. In a playgroup ‘hypothetical’, she says that her reaction to being hit by her husband would be a desire to win. She exposes the intimate confidences of her ‘best friend’ to amuse herself.) This pattern continues throughout the book, teasing the reader with ambiguous events, then confirming what has been hinted at with a switch of narrators.

Lynch writes well. She is a keen observer of human behaviour, cleverly equipping her characters with personal habits, mannerisms and minor details that help them to ring true. Cleanskin makes palpable the white noise of domestic boredom: exhausting in its cacophony of minor detail, yet restless with the yawning chasm of hours to fill. The heart of the story, though, is in the conflict between domesticated surfaces and the savage that lurks at their core.