Bad Relations by Cressida Connolly

Viking, £14.99, 288 pages

Families don’t always bring out the best in people,” says one of the characters towards the end of Cressida Connolly’s novel Bad Relations. Despite its title, this gem is about much more than familial discord through the generations; its themes are memory, loss, grief and redemption. It begins in the Crimean War, with officer William Gale. His valour earns him a Victoria Cross, though he is wounded invisibly with PTSD having lost many of his friends and his younger brother in the field.