Not a word is wasted in this chilling novella. In it, the four Prime children have an uneventful upbringing in a bleak and secluded North Country farmhouse called the Beacon. Colin, the eldest, is kind and responsible, the natural heir to the family home, while Berenice, the youngest, is forever the baby, spoilt by the unconditional love of her big sister, May.

After winning a scholarship May goes off to university in London but experiences terrible hallucinations that bring her back to the farm after only a year. Frank is the mysterious one; he spends his childhood hiding in hedgerows and distances himself from the family.

He says nothing, excels at nothing, and grows tall and unbearably thin. But Frank does manage to get away, becoming a Fleet Street journalist. Then he writes a misery memoir that becomes a bestseller, is serialised in the papers and made into a film. His book, The Cupboard Under the Stairs, details the abuses that he says he suffered as a child at the hands of his parents and siblings. Hill’s novel is keen to show the effects on those who have to live with what has been written. “None of them had been prepared for what had happened ... people stared and kept their distance.” Colin is shocked by what he sees as Frank’s shameful dishonesty. “It was not the truth as Colin knew it ... It was not Frank’s truth because none of the things he described had ever happened.”

Meanwhile, Berenice understands that her life has been undermined for ever. “I don’t give a toss about Frank and why,” she says. “I mind what he’s done to us with this. I mind what he’s done to Dad’s memory.” More complex is May’s reaction to the book and how it taps in to our understanding of her terrors in London.

Why did she experience such anxiety? Why did she reject her chance of freedom, thinking: “freedom had not been for her, she had been afraid of it, and life under the rule of fear was not life worth having. At the Beacon May feels safe.” Hill leaves you wondering about the connection between Frank and May: whether their imaginations are linked, their terrors springing from the same source?

The Beacon by Susan Hill (Vintage, £6.99; Buy this book)

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