The mirror - Lynn Freed

A gripping story about what one strong, sexy woman really wants, and gets.

This is simply a completely convincing tale, really well told in pitch-perfect prose, of a young Englishwoman - spirited, bold, sexually liberated and ruthless - who arrives in South Africa in the 1920s to take up a position as a housekeeper, and then proceeds to reinvent herself brazenly before our very eyes.

We're not given to know much of her English past, but are instead required to marvel at her performance as a bold, independent woman getting on, through depression, deceit and disappointment.

The novel has just the right amount of period feel, without ever becoming literary pastiche. In fact, it reads like a feminine counterpart to Stephen Millhauser's masterly Martin Dressler.