Daphne du maurier

‘We can never go back again,’ wrote Daphne du Maurier in her bestselling novel Rebecca (1938). ‘The past is still too close to us.’ Yet back she went, in book after book, to the past of her remarkable family. In 1934, six months after the death of her father, the matinée idol Gerald du Maurier, Daphne wrote his biography, portraying him as a spoilt man-baby with a ‘stable’ of mistresses. Gerald’s own father, George du Maurier, was the celebrated book illustrator and Punch cartoonist whose creation of characters such as Mrs Ponsonby de Tomkyns and Lady Gatheremall skewered the Victorian nouveaux riches.

Scarlett Thomas likes islands: either literal sea-girt territories or closed enclaves where this wickedly inventive novelist practises her richly enjoyable experiments in plot and form. If her recent Oligarchy found its sour-sweet spot in a grisly girls’ boarding school, The Sleepwalkers creates another insular possession: the Greek island of ‘Kathos’, which almost resembles Samos. Here, within sight of the Turkish coast, the newlyweds Evelyn and Richard arrive as late-September storms brew to undergo their honeymoon from hell. Ever since novels such as Bright Young Things (also island-set) and PopCo, Thomas has known how to fuse an acidly satirical streak of observation with storytelling artifice that keeps her readers pleasurably unsettled and alert.