Paperbacks

She appears to be ideal for the job - calm, conscientious, tidy - but beneath her docile exterior, Josephine Strane is the childminder from hell. The opening sentence of this study of corrupted innocence is shiver-inducing - "Josephine Strane carried her bags like ungainly carcasses" - and it gets worse, believe me. Wall has picked up on one of the major preoccupations of contemporary society, a rare enough event in contemporary fiction. He has also written a book that is hard to categorise, taut as a thriller, scarifying as a horror story, but finely written and eerily evocative. His prose has a satisfying density - which is, perhaps, to be expected from a successful poet - but its chilling power derives largely from understatement; he knows, not just what to write, but what to leave unsaid. Minding Children is also resolutely uncompromising in its eschewal of glib judgments or pious condemnations. This is a book you won't forget in a hurry.