Zoe Stamper, Junior researcher in Ancient Greek Tragedy, the younger partner in a same-sex marriage which has produced two children, Zoe is, after almost 20 years, now messily attempting to separate from her spouse, Dr Penny Cartwright. Complications are added by the fact that Robin, the children’s biological father, who donated sperm to both women and is fully present in their lives, occupies the flat below theirs. Robin’s uncompromising parental role, rigidly set out before either child was even conceived, is amplified by a fourth party, his sister Justine – who also happens to be Penny’s-ex. Zoe, down the academic pecking order- an a nervous ingenue as far as Penny’s sophisticated circle is concerned, Penny leaves Zoe a cryptic note, and a passionate affair ensues. Mandelson spins a lacerating account of coercive control. When a couple first meet, in 1996, at a faculty Christmas party in the flat which Penny 35, (a dazzlingly stylish tenured lecturer in literature at the London University) at the time shares with Justine ( Glimpse off-stage) angrily filleting fish in the kitchen, Zoe Stamper, is a raw and unconfident Classics post-grad of 25. Penny is spellbinding and frequently exhausting study in jealousy and instability, will constantly thwart Zoe’s hesitant attempts to advance her career. Zoe loves to cook and to garden as brilliant, fatalistic similes fall thick and fast.” The minutes have collapsed in on themselves, tight as hollyhock seeds” dropped onions roll “thumping down the stairs like little heads”. Penny, a brash egotistical and enjoyably rude Australian, is the honey-blonde foil to Zoe’s “dark heavy fall of hair”, her self-loathing and nervous if ever-hopeful personality. Soon Zoe moves into Penny’s flat while Justine is shunted downstairs.In 2014, as Zoe attempts to break out of that domestic prison that Penny, aided and abetted by Robin and Justine, have built around her, using the now-teenage children as collateral. Anyone who has gone through marital or parental disruption will recognise these unholy scenes of attrition and breakdown, from the useless attempts at mediation to the revealed lies and betrayals, and the overwhelming incandescent rage.Zoe has been bullied  and gaslit for years not just by the central group, but also by their wider circle of friends – a raucous bunch of mostly expat Australians, whose cringeworthy sex parties Mandelson sends up as much as she does the academic life, aspects which are a welcome and diversionary hoot, such as this snapshot from the staff common room: ”Ariadne Prescott, historian of madness, is spreading a level teaspoonful of margarine onto her daily rice-cake. She once said to Zoe “ Being a lesbian shouldn’t be the most interesting thing about you, but it is”.

Wife by Charlotte Mandelson, Mantle £18.99, 368 pages.