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I've just read this book in a rainy day Amsterdam cafe. I couldn't stop reading it, away from home it had all the mystery twists and beautiful studies of character that make you homesick and want to runnaway from home at the same time. It reminds you of all those friendships that have ever gone wrong and you never understood why. You see, there's Amy and her friend Ash and they're completely opposite and completely the same. You know the story, it's very familiar but Ali Smith avoids all cliche and paints an emotional landscape that rings true. It makes you feel uneasy and makes you want to be in love - classy really. I'm off to buy her other books..

Ali Smith's first (and to my view her best) novel is really two linked novellas. In Part I, we meet Amy, a mysterious single mother living in a caravan in Scotland, and Amy's eight-year-old daughter Kate. Due - as we soon realize - to some strange mental breakdown, Amy is unable to read, and relies on Kate to do any reading needed for her. Suddenly, and mysteriously, the ability to read begins to come back to her, and she makes the decision to take Kate to meet her parents, and then to take her on holiday to Italy, staying near Pompei. Gradually, we learn a bit about Amy's life; that she was once an academic, that she is very frightened of a former friend named Aisling McCarthy, and that Kate may or may not have been a stolen baby and not Amy's child. Smith tells this part of the story in the third person, partly from Amy's point of view and partly from Kate's. She enters into the world of the eight-year-old child absolutely wonderfully - Kate's one of the very few children in modern fiction I've really identified with; and Amy is also a powerfully created character. There are amazing descriptions of train journeys, Amy's family's house, Italy and even life in chilly Northern Scotland.

The second part of the novel initially seems almost unconnected to the first, and is told from the point of view of Ash (Aisling - the Aisling McCarthy mentioned in Part I as we learn). Ash, an actress, is visiting Scotland before going to Hollywood to make a film. She remembers her past, starting with her teenage years, when when she was living in Inverness with her brothers and widower father. Ash meets Amy one summer and they become friends. A couple of years later, having officially come out as bisexual (and lost quite a bit of popularity in her own town as a result) and had an affair with a teacher, Ash receives a card from Amy and on a whim heads to Cambridge, where Amy is now a student. The bulk of Part II describes Ash and Amy's on-off friendship/relationship (though I'm not sure they ever sleep together) over the years in Cambridge as Amy moves from being a student to being a don, Ash's affairs with other men and women, particularly a playwright called Simone, and how the relationship ended. The final section has Ash, about to go to America, meditating on her life and what the future might hold.

This section also has some truly wonderful writing - brilliant descriptions of Cambridge and Scotland, and of hopeless passion, some vivid and likeable characters such as Simone and Carmen, and interesting thoughts on lesbianism and bisexuality. Ash is a compelling and likeable narrator, and, having been to Cambridge myself, I felt she brought the city and the university in all its charm and snobbism wonderfully to life.

However, the book left me feeling slightly 'hungry' at the end. I didn't quite believe the melodrama of Ash's taking her revenge on Amy - this was the point where I began to wonder what was real and what was Ash's fantasy. And I'd have loved to have known what really happened between Amy and Ash in the end, what caused Amy's breakdown and if she ever returned to academic life, whether Ash died or where she disappeared to, if Kate was her child and - as another reviewer has noted - what happened to Kate? I don't know if Smith was ever planning a sequel or if she wanted to leave things for the reader to carry on inventing (a la Angela Carter) but I felt that there were a few too many unsolved mysteries as I ended the book. Still - five stars for the most incredible writing and sensitive handling of characters.

Given the author's rejection of spoon-fed narrative it's not surprising that the reader is invited to assume/fill in or leave certain blanks in this anatomy of a relationship and its repurcussions.

The first section on Amy and Kate is so captivating that it does come as a disappointment to leave them and re-involve oneself with a new character, until the second section begins to shed light on the first.

In the end this tale of fractured relationships and unfinished stories reflect the passage of life itself and remain in the memory after the final page is turned.