Seven years after the death of his son, Mark Fife is confronted by a woman convinced the boy's ghost lingers in his old house. The implications threaten to shatter the new life he has built with a loving fiancee. But if he is a sceptic, his ex-wife is not, and Mark becomes haunted by an elusive search for happiness, forgiveness and conviction.

Although the cover hints at the misery-memoir genre  and some readers will balk at section titles such as "The Little Boy Who Used to Live Here" and "The Ghost-Killer"  this debut novel from one of Granta's best young American writers is moving without being mawkish. Reined in by the banalities of the everyday, the characters and their difficult relationships are convincingly realised. The narrative crawls forward, dragged down by Mark's memory, recreating mourning's sickly oscillation between the present and the past.

This is not so much a book about ghosts as about the uncanny and unbalancing power of language, recollection and repetition. Above all, it is about the search for comfort in the darkest of places. Coake's descriptions are fresh and searing, and his considered, well-paced writing has the ability to draw from the reader a painful, arresting empathy.