ABSTRACT
Few novelists in the period since the early 1990s have written about damaged lives and destructive, often obsessive relationships with the same mixture of intensity and psychological insight as Julie Myerson. Many of Myerson's characters are haunted by what has happened to them and, indeed, the supernatural lurks in the shadows of much of her fiction. Apparitions and ghosts cross her pages, spooks that might be real or might only be projections of the characters' emotions and states of mind. In Myerson's fiction man very definitely hands on misery to man, and the complex relationships between the characters in Sleepwalking, their family links subtly revealed as the narrative unfolds, are her first examples of intergenerational unhappiness. In the past decade few have looked back with such an absence of nostalgia and such an unblinkered freedom from the cliches of costume drama and the heritage industry as Myerson does in her fourth novel, Laura Blundy.
