Award-winning novelist, Riley who won a Betty Trask and Somerset Maugham award, and a Windham-Campbell prize worth $175,000, from her analyst’s couch, drills into the gaps between her characters to reveal strained relationships with their parents, particularly their mothers set in north of England or in the US.  Palm House is narrated by Laura Miller, a writer living in precarious life of house shares and freelancing in London. Laura Miller and Edmund Putnam is the deputy editor of a literary magazine called Sequence, who have been friends for a long time whose happy meeting of minds, with long evenings spent huddled in an ancient pub by the Thames, where they share office gossip, reflect on their teenage passions, and lament the state of the world. When a company man named Simon Halfpenny, who insists that everyone call him Shove

 Is parachuted into the editorship and wants to turn Sequence into  a “sort of London  version of the New Yorker”. After who Putnam lost his father has been harder to reach, as the magazine to which he has dedicated his life has been hijacked by an insufferable new editor, Simon. Putnam resigns,  drifting into lassitude  while becoming “exultant in his misery”. Shoves doomed attempts to expand Sequence’s readership- commissioning esteemed old hacks, redesigning the magazine, writing editorials that begin with sentences such as “What it is about dogs? ” are nicely skewered.

Laura troubled by her prickly mother and a tricky past, in a beautiful and indifferent city, her day-to-day life is precarious.  But as Putnam starts to sink into despondency, she must try to bring him back.

Laura recalls a holiday to Dubrovnik with her mother and grandmother. They visit a Palm reader, buy some unfashionable shoes and are mocked by local teenagers. Her brief relationship with an actor named Lawrence who is “ so actorly, he seemed at times to be acting the part of an actor”.

A school friend of Putnam who invites two women around to his parents’ house and makes an ugly, unwanted pass at one of them; the TC producer who invites Laura to live with him while she’s waiting for her own flat purchase to go through and proceeds to make her life awkward. Chris Patrick, a 29-year-old comedian who speaks in a Dickensian mockney brogue, invites the besotted 15-year-old Laura to London, and casually rapes her. During the dismal encounter, he observes that Laura’s labia look “like a little pound coin” while joylessly manipulating her into various positions. When she leaves, he warns her  that she will “probably get a bit of  thrush tomorrow”.

The Palm House is a novel of enduring friendships and small mercies, leaves us with curious sense of possibility. Even in adulthood Laura hasn’t been able to admit to herself weaht she experienced as a teenager.

Anna a teenage friend of Laura ‘s and a fellow Chris Patrick groupie, “was always laughing her head off or else she was pantomiming shock, or a swoom, or extreme sophisticiaion” – that “laughing her head off” telling us more about Laura’s own pantomiming participation in adult life  than any description she could provide.

The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley, Picador £16.99/ York Review Books $16.99, 224 pages.