Summer Hours by Alessandra Thom review: 'a fascinating knot of relationships'

Why the disproportionately lengthy afterglow? Partly it's the vivid-yet-impressionistic picture it paints of Edinburgh during a heatwave - a shimmering, mirage-like take on a city which is more typically portrayed as dark and grey, a place which, as the author points out, "suits the rain". Partly it's the intriguingly nuanced portrayal of the inner life of its 20-something protagonist, Roisin, who seems to drift along in a dream-like state of disconnectedness only occasionally punctured by moments of intense, knife-like emotion. And partly it's the way in which Summer Hours manages to effortlessly distil many of the challenges faced by Generation Z-ers into the life of one young woman, struggling to make sense of a world in which there doesn't seem to be an obvious place for her.

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When we first meet Roisin she is sitting in an empty bath in her flat with her childhood friend Eve, drinking wine and eating strawberry laces while the sun pours in through the window, and in just a handful of pages Thom expertly seeds all the various tensions that will shape the course of the novel.

We learn that Roisin has just lost her job at a cafe on Leith Walk, after being sacked for sleeping through a shift; that Eve has been staying with her for "a couple of months", after falling out with her parents; that Roisin's flatmate Cal has a "proper job", is no fan of Eve and wants her gone; and that Roisin is in no rush for her friend to move out. Indeed, there's every sign that Roisin is infatuated with Eve, perhaps even a little in love with her. Eve though, has a boyfriend and - more importantly for Eve and Roisin's friendship - that boyfriend has a twin sister called Clare, a wealthy, married "self-defined free spirit" who makes Roisin feel "very young and very small".

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To say much more about the plot would be a disservice; suffice to say that Thom displays great skill in tangling her characters up in a fascinating knot of relationships - some sexual, some platonic, some hovering in the deliciously ambiguous no-man's land in between. Along the way, she also asks important questions about the extent to which all relationships are in some way transactional - perhaps more so now than ever, in a world where the gulf between rich and poor yawns ever wider. It's a horrible cliché to put at the end of a review, but it really will be interesting to see what Thom writes next.

Summer Hours, by Alessandra Thom, Polygon, £12. Alessandra Thom is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 18 August.