The Last Pier by Roma Tearne, book review: A poetic tale of family ties, love and loss

Tearne is a master storyteller who rearranges her pieces on the chess board with devastating skill

Master storyteller: Roma Tearne is brilliant on first love and sibling rivalry

Everyone loves a wartime English country house novel (think The Remains of the Day, Atonement or Little Stranger). You already know that Cook will be ringing her hands in the kitchen, as beautiful doomed youth play tennis, scoff cucumber sandwiches and engage in unsuitable love affairs – before conscription takes hold.

And certainly The Last Pier, set in a crumbling mansion house in Bly, Suffolk, in the summer of 1939, brings together a group of characters – servants as well as masters – under one roof. Beautiful 17-year-old Rose has the attention of every man in the neighbourhood, while her mother, father and aunt seem to be involved in a painful ménage a trois.

The action is filtered through the consciousness of Rose's younger sister Cecily, a dreamy 13-year-old, forced to spy on the puzzling behaviour of adults, as she falls helplessly in love with a childhood friend.

It could all be a posh English soap opera. But in the hands of the Sri Lankan-born novelist and film maker, Roma Tearne (who grew up in Brixton), Suffolk turns out to be a diverse landscape peopled by Italians and Germans; gypsies, refugees and spies. No one is quite what they seem. Tearne, a master storyteller (whose previous novels were shortlisted for the Costa and the Kiriyama book prizes) rearranges her pieces on the chess board with devastating skill (a major character dies on page 12), making us unpick the same events from multiple perspectives.

Nearly 30 years later, Cecily, whose early life has clearly been blighted by tragedy, returns to the derelict Big House to unravel family secrets, in an attempt to silence the gleeful, discordant voices in her head (a poignant metaphor for depression and guilt).

This is an unapologetically poetic novel – haiku-like fragments punctuate the main narrative, making your head spin. The doubling (of sisters, lovers, brothers) can frustrate initially. Sometimes it's almost too bloody sad. But Tearne is brilliant on first love, sibling rivalry and that long hot summer of adolescence that we all remember before we had to put away childish things. By the final chapters, tension grips like a vice, and you're still reading at 3am.

And there is a poignant coda. The novel references the sinking of the Arandora Star, an English source of shame, when a former cruise ship carrying 800 Italian and German internees from Liverpool to Canada (many rounded up at random in Britain) was torpedoed by a German submarine. Staying with her family in Tuscany, Tearne met an Italian man whose father and relatives had drowned on the Arandora, who begged her to tell his family story before he died. Why had the English turned on them, when they'd lived there happily for years?

It's timely of course – with the 75th anniversary of the sinking this year – but the way Tearne weaves the event into the texture of her novel is dazzling. The so-called "aliens" who lost their suitcases in the middle of the Atlantic, are brought vividly to life, never to be forgotten.