Emily Woof has written an absolute smasher of a novel in The Lightning Tree. Going against the zeitgeist, or perhaps sensing a new one, her heroine, Ursula, crashes and burns after a transcendent experience with monks in India ("I was the hill, I am the hill"), a revelation that baffles her family, her schoolmates and the lover she left to go travelling. As well as being a writer – this is her second novel – playwright and actor Woof is a trapeze artist and thus adept at high-wire antics. The Lightning Tree is full of them, swooping through five generations of Ursula's family, and from Newcastle to Oxford to India to Padiham, with giddying aplomb and fizzingly beautiful prose. At its heart, this is a love story, between Ursula and working-class hero Jerry. Descriptions of their lovemaking, with which the book opens and closes, will restore your faith in sex, in life. There are lacunae, but 10 out of 10 for a big, earthy, generous novel that allows redemption even for the bitter and twisted. Yay!
