Uncle Paul: Welcome to the Nightmare Summer Holiday

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To Fremlin’s great credit, she manages to make the reader feel sympathetic towards the fatherless Cedric by the end, despite his rather annoying habits! What follows is a wonderfully slow burn thriller with the tension ratcheting up by degrees until everyone is at screaming pitch. This novel unfolds slowly and, like her debut novel, this is much more about the characters than anything else. There's gentle humour too, with character types and scenarios you'd expect to see in any Fawlty Towers or Agatha Christie. Sometimes the novels chosen are new, often they are from the backlist and occasionally re-issued from way back.

With the greater emphasis on personal rather than parental relationships, this is perhaps why Uncle Paul failed to resonate with me quite so much as The Hours Before Dawn. I could describe it as an old-fashioned domestic thriller, but even that might be a bit of an overstatement: the emphasis is firmly on the domestic. Next we have Isabel who seems to get overwrought at the drop of a hat because she senses her husband may not love her and their two boys quite as much as she'd like him to. An interesting first publication date, a time of flux with stuff from WW2 still hanging over people.

I was very satisfied with the ending, which I guessed, but not until I was a good way in, and other possibilities seemed to be exhausted. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. Fremlin manages the tension extremely well here, dialling it up and down a few times as the story unfolds. On the surface, Uncle Paul could be the relatively innocent story of three sisters getting caught up in troublesome domestic matters during a seaside holiday. And all to no purpose, for nothing had happened—nothing had ever been going to happen; it had all been in Mildred’s imagination.

The "twist" and the intensity doesn't really happen until the last 15 pages of the book, and until then, it is dragged out by pointless characters and scenarios. First published in 1959 and recently reissued by Faber, Uncle Paul was Fremlin’s second book, and what a brilliant novel it is – a wonderfully clever exploration of what can happen when we allow our imagination to run wild and unfettered, conjuring up all sorts of nightmare scenarios from our fears and suspicions.It would be great if Faber carry on with these Fremlin reissues as they have quite a few in their Faber Finds series – The Parasite Person included! For myself the entertainment rested on Fremlin's children - a classic 50s child, Cedric, who manages on most occasions to outsmart the adults, and Isabel's two small boys, doing precisely child-like things, with a vivid sense of children's self-focus. I really hope Faber decide to reissue a few more of these in similar eye-catching covers to capitalise on Uncle Paul’s success! Once again, this allows Fremlin to prey on her protagonists’ anxieties as Meg oscillates between fearing for her life and thinking the whole Mildred situation is absurd!