The Petty Details of So-and-So's Life by Camilla Gibb

A painful escape from childhood's bubble

As well as a neat line in quirky titles, Camilla Gibb is developing a reputation for sharp, coruscating narratives of dysfunctional families. Her first novel, Mouthing the Words, was compared to The Bell Jar. Certainly its tragic anti-heroine, the sexually abused, anorexic Thelma, was a fine paragon of fucked-up modern girlhood.

On the surface, Petty Details... is equally grim. As children, Emma and Blue are so neglected by their distracted parents that they develop a claustrophobic bond. Their father, Oliver, is "prone to Big Ideas and Pronouncements", and sudden violence. Their mother, Elaine, refuses to live in America – scene of a prom night humiliation written with excruciating wit – so they move to Niagara Falls ("The Canadian side"). The children, aged four and five, are sent there alone by bus, carrying signs reading "Niagara Falls or bust".

Theirs is a childhood of shared experiences and dreams, secret baby languages and symbiotic trust. They make a "bubble" in the basement where they listen to their drunk mother arguing with their father, who has moved into the garage to become an "inventor". They hold hands in the schoolyard until Brenda Tailgate tells Emma "she must be a pervert because sisters were supposed to hate their brothers".

Their bubble bursts when, one day, Oliver disappears. Blue's determination to find him takes him across Canada and away from Emma. She is determined to distance herself from Oliver. She changes her name, first to "Tabatha, daughter of the good witch Samantha", then to Oksana, "the only surviving member of the Russian royal family". She falls for a nice, well-educated boy, but it is his family she really loves. She even takes up archaeology, scratching an imaginary history from dirt, until a "discovery" forces her to accept she is a dreamer, just like her father. Far from being full of momentous epiphanies, archaeology, like life, is in the petty details.

For Blue, the demons take a different form. He paints himself with tattoos, but still feels betrayed by his own body, violated and abandoned and unable to settle until he confronts his father in a violent resolution.

Petty Details... contains two simultaneous trajectories: its characters' relentless moving on, and their journey away from secret baby-talk. Both result in the slow failure of their ability to communicate at all. As an adult, Emma is reduced to filling reams of paper with "Dear Blue..."

To rejoin the world as adults, the siblings must sever that bond. "In a world of limited love, one Siamese twin is separated so the other can live and breathe," thinks Blue, as he makes a bizarre sacrifice he thinks will save his sister. It's a tentative, and slightly queasy, happy ending. But in the context of this funny, twisted, heartbreaking novel, it's enough to make you weep with gratitude