The powerlessness and fury of women find an outlet in their spoken protests, their pleas to be heard by idiotic doctors, husbands who cannot see their marriages unravelling. The rank uselessness of the men who appear in this novel crystallises in their words, in the way they contradict their words with their actions.

The dialogue is so quick and multilayered as to take one’s breath away. does the desire come from some creaturely place, pre-civilised, some biological throb that floods her bloodways with the message Make more of yourself! To repeat, not to improve. Affronts to vanity worn as badges of the ultimate accomplishment. In a place that is neither mind nor heart, or both at once, she wants an ashy line down the center of a round belly she wants nausea spider veins at the knee backs, loose stomach skin, lowered breasts. They are weird, passionate, unforgettable characters. Roberta is a single woman trying to conceive, and many clocks are ticking against her Mattie, her teenage student, has an unwanted baby in her womb Gin, an unabashed witch, finds herself on trial for a crime she did not commit and Susan, a former lawyer, feels trapped in her marriage and lost in motherhood. Like that novel, Red Clocks is far more driven by characterisation, and its exploration of the bonds between women, than by its plot, which comes down to relatively predictable binary choices. Risky, to try to out-Atwood Atwood, but the book on which this models itself is The Robber Bride.

Red Clocks by Leni Zumas