That I was prepared to do so speaks volumes for the exceptional quality of Ruskovich’s writing. At one point I failed to recognise a character and had to return to the beginning to identify him. In the final third of the novel, telling becomes excessively fragmentary, resembling short stories in a composite novel. What can we understand or intuit about other people, given that our knowledge owes so much to subjective guesswork?.

Idaho is a meditation on the power and limits of the individual imagination, as well as on memory and its aberrations. A fragmented construction zigzags to and fro between multiple perspectives and unchronological dates. Structurally, the novel is complex, requiring and rewarding a reader’s intent concentration. The author’s sympathetic imagination extends, movingly, to all animal life, the child who is killed and the fly she may have killed. Ruskovich’s human characters keep company with native animals, from moose to deer, from beetles to flies, subject to the same vicissitudes and the one death. Lyrical, sharply beautiful prose washes through Idaho, a dark and poignant debut that never quite manages to bring its characters to life yet remains gripping from beginning to end. It’s a novel about the psychological ripples of an unthinkable crime, but it ultimately wavers when it comes to laying bare the psyches of its subjects, which remain too opaque to be revelatory.

The result, perhaps intentional, is that he remains a cipher, from the shape of his mourning to the possible shades of guilt, rage, heartbreak and betrayal that might lie underneath it.

Aside from jumbled memories of his early years, his romance with Jenny, we hear little directly from him. By giving the narration of the novel mostly to its women, Ruskovich sets Wade, the man at its heart, to the side. Yet the forceful, crackling life of her scenery isn’t quite matched by the characters that move within it. Ruskovich’s prose, which keenly captures the harsh beauty of the Idaho mountains where the novel takes place, can be intoxicating the sticky sourness of lemonade and the sting of woody smoke in the air hit the reader almost viscerally in the tastebuds and nose.

Emily ruskovich books