Catch

Catharine wakes to an empty bed. Her husband Tom, a human rights lawyer, is away on business in Birmingham. It is the first time she has woken alone in their cottage, in a quiet village, fifty-five minutes from Charing Cross, since they moved from London five months ago. Normally they get up together, she and Tom. She is certain she has as equal a job to do in the world as her husband, and that it will not wait. The fact that she doesn't know what it is, isn't the point. Soon, eventually, it will be to have a baby.

She is, as she confesses, a serious woman; realistic and practical. She has relinquished her hold on past ambitions, her music and her career, in preparation for family life. Now, without distractions, she wonders what she is to do. In her darkened living room the piano waits like an uninvited guest, demanding of her that she re-evaluate her life.

Time progresses, and in encounters both real and imagined - with the village's inhabitants, with her best friend Maria, with Tom - Catharine plucks at the fabric of her life until it is threadbare. From assured beginnings the day rushes to a realisation of her very worst fears, and to a denouement of devastating poignancy.

Imbued with the poise and style of Ian McEwan's Saturday and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Catch is an extraordinary debut novel, a perceptive and wholly absorbing examination of the sanctuaries we build to protect ourselves, written in prose that is both painterly and precise. It is certain to establish Simon Robson's reputation as one of the finest English writers working today.