Real events haunt Kate Atkinson's new novel: a family slaughtered by a stranger, a horrific train crash, a woman living in fear of her violent ex-husband. The fictional murders that open the book recall the real-life killings of Lin and Megan Russell in 1996, and the sole survivor is one of the dead woman's daughters. Joanna Mason is six when she witnesses the murders in Devon and the story then jumps 30 years, locating Joanna in Edinburgh where she is married with a baby and working as a GP.

Few people know about the tragedy in Joanna's childhood and Reggie, the precocious young woman she employs to help her with the baby, isn't one of them. Reggie has her own secrets, including a thuggish, drug-dealing brother and her mother's death by drowning. Reggie adores Joanna, and when the GP and her baby suddenly go missing she is convinced that something terrible has happened to them. But her attempts to persuade the police fall on deaf ears, not least because Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe is obsessed with protecting a woman who is living in a safe house after her family has been attacked by her ex-husband.

When Will There Be Good News? is not a detective novel in the formal sense, although it is full of unsolved mysteries and suspense. It is one of those rare fictions that defies categorisation, creating a milieu that is a recognisable version of the real world but inflected with its author's preoccupations. One of these is violence against women, not in a misandrist sense (dreadful things also happen to men in the book) but as an undeniable fact of modern existence.

For the most part (Reggie is the possible exception), Atkinson doesn't idealise her characters; she is too good a writer for that, having won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize for her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. What interests her in this novel is how people survive appalling tragedies, turning some characters into permanent victims while others have unexpected reserves of guile.

It is also a book about how hard it is to understand other people. Chances are continually being missed, and it sometimes seems, even to the rationalists among her characters, that they are being toyed with by the malign hand of fate. It is a defensive reaction, expressed with Atkinson's mordant humour, but the novel contains startling moments of truth, and its insights into human nature are simply superb.

When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
Doubleday £17.99 pp352 Buy the book

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