Shadows in an English garden

It is 1961. Linka is 11, clever, intense, with "boy's hair" and a wild imagination fuelled by Wagon Train and the war memories of the adults around her. Esper Road is a brand-new encroachment into rural England - the asbestos prefabs are soon to be cleared to make way for smart, convenient brick boxes like the one Linka lives in, but beyond the garden fences stoats squeal, children build dens and Sen, the local pervert, springs out at them from the shadows.

Linka's father, kind, unimaginative Charlie, looks to socialist politics to provide the sense of elevated purpose he experienced as an Army officer in post-war Berlin. Emma, her mother, jiving on her own in the living room, "half-crazed but full of life", teeters on the edge of mental breakdown.

Bored with wifehood, motherhood, domesticity, she is a woman ripe for liberation. But where can she find it? Can Henryk, the melancholy Polish refugee down the road, provide the answer?

Lesley Chamberlain deftly juxtaposes the ordinary with the dangerous, the humdrum with the tragic. Even this sunny corner of suburban England, she shows, is perched precariously on the fault lines of the post-war world. The Macmillan era ideal of central heating, picture windows and beans-on-toast for tea is a fragile vessel for the savage passions of unstable, deracinated people.

Emma, her emotional harmony forever shaken by the horror of her experiences as an evacuee, is just as much a casualty of war as the exiled Henryk.

Chamberlain is an expert on the rules of engagement between children. The lines between bully and victim, friend and foe, are constantly redrawn according to subtle rules which no adult could hope to understand, with the possible exception of Miss Rogers, the bespectacled, flat-shoed headmistress who reads funeral rites over the corpse of a woodpecker ("What a magnificent specimen we have to inter today!") and appreciates Linka's specialness.

The novel is full of believable characters, created in a few swift sentences. Aunt Frieda the free-spirited artist; the know-all neighbour with her insufferable quiz questions; Linka's admirer, Alan, who woos her with a dead slow-worm - all these spring effortlessly to life.

Dialogue is often stilted and peculiar, but this only enhances the atmosphere of dislocation, of blocked communication.

In Girl In A Garden, the truce between nature and civilisation is written in the sand.