If you have wondered what it would be like to cross the Atlantic on a cruise ship, the novelist Salley Vickers is here to educate you. From the various over-the-top dining options to the different levels of educational activity and sleeping accommodation, there are as many things to do on a ship such as the fictional Queen Caroline as there are different types of snob who sail on her.

The author of Miss Garnet’s Angel has clearly done her research. But Dancing Backwards offers something much better than a virtual tour around a modern cruise ship, fascinating though that is. It is a deceptively simple story about a widow, Violet, recalling her two marriages and early career as a poet as she journeys to New York to visit a man, Edwin, she once loved and feels she let down; and it packs a surprising emotional and intellectual punch.

Edwin was never a lover, but a sort of gay best friend (before such things officially existed) in the Cambridge of her youth. Together they wrote poetry, cooked cheap meals and drank gallons of Valpolicella. But when Edwin’s friend Bruno appeared on the scene their existence was disturbed by unexpected love, secret sex and divided loyalties. Then Edwin got in serious trouble and Violet failed to go to him, an event that becomes a spot in her conscience that, by the time we meet her, is almost too painful to touch.

Sea voyages can be magical things, however, and halfway out into the Atlantic’s icy, mighty waters, she decides to put her heart in order. She writes her first poem in years, tries ballroom dancing which she assumes will be dreadful but isn’t, and as she approaches her destination, finds it sur-prisingly easy to cast off her demons into the ocean.

With chapters alternating between the 1960s and now, Violet’s character unfolds with tremendous appeal. She is not afraid to “eff” and blind, or to start smoking cigarettes on a whim, or to wear silver shoes, yet she is at heart as elegant, wise and thoughtful a woman as you could hope to share a crossing with. And when she arrives in New York and meets lovely Edwin, now a happy, sober poet living in a stylish brownstone, she finds a simpler, more loving resolution to her problems than she ever imagined. And so ends a wonderfully satisfying, richly rewarding journey for the reader too.

Dancing Backwards by Salley Vickers (Fourth Estate, £14.99; Buy this book; 259pp)

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist