The Bellini Madonna, By Elizabeth Lowry

Elizabeth Lowry's debut novel has one of the creepiest narrators since Nabokov's Humbert Humbert; this one, too, falls for a young girl, though one slightly older than Lolita. Thomas Lynch is an acquisitive art historian, who has already been sacked from his New England college for sexual misdemeanours, when he arrives at Mawle House in Oxford, on the hunt for a missing masterpiece he believes is concealed in its grounds. Young Anna is the owner of the house, and she and her mother are well aware of the reason Lynch has come to see them; whether they will let him get what he wants is another matter.

Lowry weaves in a late 19th-century diary as well as Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" to produce an effectively chilly tale about desire, greed and amorality. Yet, perhaps because of those elements, it somehow fails to feel remotely contemporary, or remotely real. From the very beginning, with all its painterly and literary references but without that postmodern, self-conscious nod to its own artifice, this novel feels like exactly what it is – a made-up story. I wasn't convinced for a minute that it was anything more than a fabrication. But I did enjoy it.