While I Was Gone By Sue Miller (Bloomsbury, £6.99 in UK)

This is one of those too easily overlooked novels. Narrator Jo Becker is a careful, unabashedly self-absorbed character. Now a vet in her 50s, she is married to a nice guy minister and they live in an ordered home complete with a trio of dogs. Her three daughters are now grown and have left, becoming strangers in the process. Into her life with its small frustrations comes a sick dog. With it enter two coincidences; the woman who brings the dog to the surgery is her youngest daughter's professor. Secondly the professor's husband, who owns the dog, is someone Becker knew in the chaotic days of her youth. The flashbacks this heralds reveal a great deal about Becker's ruthlessly secretive personality. Far more interesting however is Miller's treatment of Becker's regret for the lost rituals of her daughters' respective childhoods and the ending of her mothering role. There is no humour, the prose is earthbound and the pace is as slow as life, yet this meticulous, convincing narrative delivered by a needy, candidly unheroic character encourages the reader to look beyond the stylistic limitations.