Annie Freud’s award-winning first collection, The Best Man That Ever Was, introduced readers to a remarkably versatile new voice; The Mirabelles delivers a similarly exhilarating cornucopia – the Mask of Temporary Madness, Marc Almond, mini-novels a sonnet long, Carottes Vichy, and the most gripping account of a billiard game you’ll ever read. However, in a new sequence derived from family letters, Freud has invented almost a new kind of writing: neither ‘found’ nor ‘made’ in the conventional sense, these poems are profoundly moving, and startling in their boldly unfashionable lack of irony. Elsewhere The Mirabelles is full of the world-stuff – the clothes and food, the art and social intrigues – with which we dress and conceal our deeper emotions and appetites.

In the end, this is a book about reality and its representations, and the truth and lies we tell about ourselves.