Victoria Hannan is a beautiful writer. Her prose is clean and the world she creates is incredibly clear. Hannan is skilled at dropping you into the middle of a situation and very quickly orientating you with the details: the people, the place and the circumstances.

The ‘situation’ in Marshmallow is a sad and slightly frantic one. We are introduced to the lives of five very close, but very different friends, who are still reeling a year on from a horrible accident. Told from the five different viewpoints, with less weight on the grieving mother (yes, if you have a small child be prepared to read about your worst fear), the story skips between the past and the present. What happened a year ago is slowly revealed, as is just how much each of the friends has changed since the tragic death. They are shadows of their former selves, each obsessing, spiralling and sadly not communicating. Their relationships are suffering, some of their jobs are suffering and, most of all, they are suffering. As the anniversary day looms, things come to a head, emotions spill over, fists fly, drinks are drunk and gardens ruined. Though the novel is steeped in sadness and the ever-present guilty feelings of ‘if only’, this is also a book full of life, deep friendship and, ultimately, hope. We can sometimes go through the worst and still come out the other side, perhaps not the same or entirely whole, but still, we can survive.

Hannan writes quiet sadness so well; if you haven’t read her debut Kokomo yet, please do. It is some kind of magic that she manages to pull us willingly through the hardest of situations. I didn’t want to stop reading this book. In fact, I was so greedy to get back to it that I took the tram a number of times instead of cycling to work.