Rebarbative relatives abound: The Palm House, by Gwendoline Riley, reviewed
Like its predecessor My Phantoms (2021), Gwendoline Riley’s new novel is stuffed to the gills with the sort of people she has come to specialise in – who, once assembled, supply a kind of casebook of rebarbativeness. To begin with there are the terrible men: – the thespian, Lawrence, for example, who says things like ‘cheery-bye’ and whose decrepit bathroom has ‘a Miss Havisham aspect’; or Chris, the lairy Irish stand-up, by whom, as a besotted teenager, the heroine Laura Miller is cheerlessly seduced. Then there are the terrible old absconding mums, here represented by the Pernod-swigging Mrs Miller, who, having installed Laura and herself in her own mother’s establishment,
