The house in Hackney, in Novel About My Wife, is one of thousands of terrace houses in east London bought on a big mortgage by couples with media jobs who are seeking a home, a refuge and a place to start from. It has a small back yard, still awaiting weeding and planting, cheap kitchen cupboards for the expensive olive oils, borlotti beans and brown rice, and a small back room that is being prepared for a new baby. It also has strange smells that seem to come and go, the suspicion of rats, an invasion of ants and a stalker who is seen by only one of the couple.

Emily Perkins's novel is a frightening tale of delusion, set in a present-day London that is recognisably hostile and full of spectres from the past. Tom and Ann are aspirant and in debt; their footing in the capital is unsteady and their optimism has to be bolstered from time to time by visits to the nicer parts of town such as Hampstead and Marylebone. Perkins catalogues the littered streets, dingy tower blocks and dangerous parks of their area with mordant economy. Her opening chapter contains a nightmarish description of being in a Tube derailment, and throughout the novel there are dangerous incidents, fights and muggings, not to mention dead-eyed shop assistants and anxious periods in hospital waiting rooms under posters of cheerful breast-feeding mothers. For Ann is having a baby at the age of 39, and her hormonal and physical changes provide a further destabilising element to her marriage. Both she and Tom come trailing rackety emotional careers (abortions and serious infidelity) and are unsure of each other. Is Ann becoming obsessive about hygiene, or just nest-building? Is she seeing things or is Tom failing to see them?

The novel evokes the complexities of their emotional life; the way the promise of the future bound up with the pregnancy founders on the expense of baby equipment; the depressing effect of the break-up of friends. Ann is seriously frightened, and setbacks in his scriptwriting career reduce Tom to tears and bluster, yet they cannot help each other. Ann's hard Australian self comes up against Tom's weaker English fecklessness, and unpaid bills, red wine and insomnia destroy their sex life. The new-age remedies offered by Ann's therapist friend Kate irritate Tom, though he, too, lets an insubstantial vision (of career success and plenty of money) rule his life. An undercurrent of the supernatural enters via the herbal medicines and aromatherapy oils, then superstitions surrounding the birth of the baby and the need to rid the house of bad karma take hold, until finally a sinister force is unleashed.

The pace is fast and inexorable. The narrative moves with certainty, taking in swift biting portraits of Tom's parents, film people and Ann's colleagues, and dropping into the story a series of terrifying revelations from a more primitive past. Tom's account of the events of the marriage (a straightforward first-person narrative with hesitations) is broken up from time to time by short dramatised sections that reveal more about the cause of Ann's fears. Perkins draws out the emotional tension and the thematic parallels while keeping the action tight and gripping. As the vulnerable pair move towards their fate, their small ship of hope heading towards the rocks, they become objects of our sympathy and concern. The appalling ending is not entirely unforeseen, but its drama progresses towards tragedy as we see life being picked up again after the worst has happened.

Perkins's earlier fiction (stories of antipodean youth and material culture) was both celebratory and satirical, scathing but full of bounce. Although her new novel deals with a more disappointed stage, it still displays her forceful, energetic prose, her glancing wit and her acute perceptions.

Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins
Bloomsbury £12.99 pp288

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