Sarah Moss’s last novel, Bodies of Light, ended in the 1880s with its heroine, Ally, qualifying as one of the first generation of female doctors and marrying Tom, an engineer specialising in the construction of lighthouses. Signs for Lost Children picks up the story weeks later. The young couple have moved to Cornwall, where Ally has taken a job in the local mental asylum for women and Tom is preparing for a six-month work trip to Japan. As he travels between the country’s cities and through its villages, his absorption in Japanese art and culture begins to overwhelm memories of home. Ally, meanwhile, living alone and spending her days caring for distressed patients, finds herself pulled back into the spiralling guilt and anxiety of her adolescence. Alternating chapters between 19th-century Japan and England, and equally attentive to material and psychological detail, Moss’s novel is a double study of alienation and independence in two unfamiliar cultures.
Signs for Lost Children is published by Granta (£12.99). Click here to order it for £10.39
