IT takes about 11 straight hours to read this novel. That's including three stops for cups of tea. Having started, I realised I wouldn't be able to put it down because I desperately wanted to know what happens to the story's main character, Alice.

I was misled early on by the assumption that this was another book about a mother/daughter relationship that wasn't. Instead, it is about a family which is probably as normal as many of those round about, with everyone in it a victim to a greater or lesser extent. Lia Mills surveys the barren landscape of Alice's childhood, and locates her story in the pain and isolation of the young girl, who daily seeks a chink in the carapace of her mother's indifference. Alice's father, on the other hand's a sadist who plays with her emotions like a cat with a sparrow.

From the beginning we are aware that there is another character present. Ruth is a therapist, and it is to her that Alice has turned in a desperate, final effort to find the source of her nightmares and overwhelming fears. The story is told to great effect through revisiting the past, although I found the device, particularly the interventions of the therapist, sometimes irritating, frequently contrived.

Mills's prose soars and swoops as she develops the irregular delights of Alice's life, the trips to Brittas, the afternoons spent picking black berries for jam, her father telling her stories of mermaids and teaching her to read and to identify flowers. Her mother constantly cautions her to "be good", but remains emotionally absent.

From early on, the reader feels the sense of foreboding; we are forewarned by an intimation of real danger, hidden violence, something not quite right. Alice has nightmares, but her mother tells her she is being stupid. She is frightened of something she can't name. Her mother tells her she has only herself to blame, and sets in motion the process whereby Alice will for evermore blame herself for anything bad that happens to her, or to those around her.

When her father drowns himself at the Forty Foot there is no grieving, only more fear. Now, while he can see her, she can't see him. Life in the house carries on more or less routinely, while Alice becomes increasingly detached from reality. The struggle to keep the nightmares at bay exhausts her. The arrival of Nell, daughter of her mother's friend, to live with them while she is in college in Dublin, brings a much needed interlude for both Alice and her mother, as they both draw sustenance from her lively presence in the home.

By the time she is a teenager and no longer able to communicate on any level with her mother, Alice is anorexic, addicted, sleeping around and without any hope. Instinctively she realises she is in trouble and needs some kind of help. Her request to see a psychologist is strongly resisted by her mother: "I'm not spending good money on that nonsense ... God only knows what you'd say to them!" The birth of a daughter, Holly, to Alice, after her mother's death, opens the final chapters of her search for the child she once was, and she sets about "finding her own help, finally ending with the therapist Ruth.

Mills has written a tense, woman centred novel in which she handles the issue of ruptured childhood with consummate care and understanding. The denouement is riveting. As a first novel it is as fine a piece of writing as we will see this year.