ORDINARY HUMAN FAILINGS

The death of a little girl incites controversy, blame, and exploitation in 1990s England.

Ever since she was a baby, Lucy Green never seemed quite right: That’s what her neighbors tell the police officers and journalists swarming their London apartment complex after she’s blamed for the death of 3-year-old Mia Enright. Lucy’s family—her loving grandmother, Rose; reclusive grandfather, John; alcoholic uncle, Richie; and unfit teenage mother, Carmel—arrived in England from Ireland shortly before her birth. In the 10 years since, Lucy’s grandmother, her primary caretaker, died, the surviving adult family members each spun into their own detached, dysfunctional orbits, and Lucy clobbered a classmate with a rock and acquired a reputation. “That little scumbag” is how Tom Hargreaves, the smarmy journalist insinuating himself into the family’s scandal-scarred life, hears her described. Tom can see the headlines already: One little girl murdering another, the cast of scoundrels, the stained family history—it’s the perfect scoop, if it turns out to be true. His journalistic playbook includes lying, bribing, deceiving, and manipulating; he’s equally eager to sequester the family from the eyes of competing journalists and to hoist the tent for his own media circus. As the police interrogate Lucy, Tom does the same to her family members, hungry for any morsel of disgrace. In the process, Carmel reflects on her miserable, dissociative pregnancy, and Richie and John steep in the betrayals and substance abuse of their past. Nolan’s writing is equally painful and propulsive. As you turn the pages, anxious to learn the truth about Lucy and Mia, the story seems to mock your very interest in it: Aren’t you, too, enthralled by the scandal, entranced by these front-page-worthy girls and their pigtailed barbarity?

Suffused with empathy, Nolan’s novel expertly illuminates the parts of ourselves we try to keep in the dark.