West London’s leafy streets hide dark family secrets

A father lies in a coma in hospital and in the coming months his family secrets unravel. Sound familiar? Then you will have read Zoë Heller's The Believers, where New York lawyer Joel Litvinoff lies prostrate with a stroke for most of the book, his illness a catalyst for
major upheavals and introspection.

In her debut novel, journalist Elizabeth Day has chosen an oddly similar storyline. In her London setting, the unpalatable patriarch is knocked off his bike in the opening sentence and when the police tell his long-suffering wife Anne, she thanks them, closes the front door and carries on making the beef casserole for supper. Another happy family!

But Day is no Heller. By choosing a plot with such similarities, Day is tempting comparison to one of today's great wordsmiths, a novelist whose study of family life is both very funny and acute.

What you have here with Scissors Paper Stone is Heller lite. Aimed at the female magazine market, it is nevertheless a very readable first novel.
You are not bombarded with a plethora of characters — Day keeps it simple with Charles the unfaithful father, Anne the disillusioned mother, her annoying friend Janet, Charlotte the damaged daughter and her new boyfriend Gabriel, who seems the only sane character in the book.

To add gravitas, as she flips back and forth from the present day to the family's dark past, Day lobs into the plot several activities that are strictly unmentionable in the leafy west London streets in which the story evolves.

Such themes demand extreme sensitivity but in Day's hands the prose can often appear clunky.

Here she is describing Anne's fear of telling her daughter she is sorry: " she realised she was frightened and that this sensation was slicked with a wet coating of sadness". I'm not sure an emotion should ever have a wet coating. And yet at other times, the mother/daughter characters are deftly crafted and believable.

In these post-Christmas days, you could happily devour this book and be buoyed by the thought that your family is not so bad after all. But for her next work, Day would do well to stay clear of a storyline already explored by a more brilliant contemporary.