Kith & Kin by Stevie Davies

Love and death in an age of flower power WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON £12.99 (255pp) £11.99 (plus £2.25 p&p per order) from 0870 800 11

The heroine of Stevie Davies's excellent new novel is first encountered as "a sift of fine silver powder" being scattered to the wind from a South Wales cliff top by her cousins, Mara and Aaron. Fatally self-destructive, maddeningly fey yet charismatic, Francesca, whose supposedly drug-fuelled suicide at the age of 23 has indelibly marked the lives of those who knew her, is a Sixties casualty. After the unearthing of a long-lost film made in the heady days of flower-power, her life is recalled by the middle-aged Mara.

Mara and Francesca grow up together as cousins in Fifties Swansea, part of a large extended family. Following the death of Francesca's father and her weak-minded, silly mother's marriage to the crudely visceral Jack, Francesca tries her hardest to inveigle her way into the heart of Mara's family. A pattern of competing for affection is set, which echoes down the years in the love both girls bear towards their gentle, patient, undervalued cousin, Aaron.

When Francesca becomes pregnant by him, their grandmother leaves her the family seat, Breuddwyd. It does not take a genius to see that selfish, feckless Francesca should not be left in charge of anything, and she proceeds to fill the house up with hippies of the most virulent sort. But Nana loves little Frankie, and it's not hard to see why. Davies has captured the essence of this particular archetype superbly: the draining, manipulative charmer, forever needy, forever feral.

Francesca is a true child of the Sixties. References abound to icons such as Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan, and Davies captures perfectly the way in which an entire generation was defined by its music. In the spaced-out eyes of admirers, Francesca becomes a character in a Dylan song. While there is tremendous cachet, the burden is immeasurable, and she cannot help but shatter under the weight of expectation.

Frankie thinks she's a pioneer. In fact, in the eyes of the feminist sisters who will succeed her, she's anything but. Nana's house becomes headquarters to "The Beloved Community", a hotch-potch of lost souls between whom not much love is lost. The Beloved Community comes to resemble in disturbing ways another experiment in communal living that went disastrously wrong, Charles Manson's "family". While not plumbing such depths of depravity, the awful George, a masterful portrait, is a very nasty piece of work, and the whole precarious edifice rests on the presumption of male superiority. "The men were tongues; the girls were ears. The ears cosied up to the tongues of choice and allowed themselves to receive the benefit of their windbag garrulities with every appearance of worship. It was worse than bloody chapel." Like the beats before them, the hippies were as traditional in their sex roles as any staid Fifties suburbanite.

The community that survives is not that of the beloved dafties, but the endlessly bickering, gossiping family group that was there all along. The dear old aunt, the hippie-turned-yuppie, the staunch chapel-goer, all combine to commune and nostalgically recall the life and loss of "our girlie". The material is all too easy to caricature, but Davies is much too astute to fall into that trap. Her characters have the ring of complex truth. These people can aggravate and endear themselves all at the same time. Just like real life.

Carol Birch's novel 'Turn Again Home' is published by Virago