Effie knows very little about her family background but she does know that her mother is a virgin and her father is not her father. At university in Dundee, she negotiates her life as if it were an off-kilter orienteering course, until a rather bizarre yellow dog and a cryptic private detective called Chick enter her life. Things get increasingly complicated until Effie begins to realise that her own family secrets are gradually being uncovered.
Kate Atkinson hit the big time with her very first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, a picaresque tale of growing up which won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year award. Five years on, that book is still prominently displayed on the bookstands even as her much-awaited third novel, Emotionally Weird, makes its debut. In many other ways, Atkinson hasn't moved too far from that first novel - Emotionally Weird is also a novel of growing up, while the constant recurrences of history which warped the plot of Behind the Scenes at the Museum also figure large here.
Structurally, however, Atkinson has started to experiment. Effie's university tale is just one of many narrative strands which weave around, and sometimes interrupt, each other - there's the novel she's writing herself, her mother's tale and a dreamlike "present" where Effie and her mother are on a distant Scottish island spinning tales to pass the time. As an experiment it does throw up some humorous double-takes on the relation of fiction and fact, but as a narrative technique it leaves the reader wondering why Atkinson bothered.
Each narrative is flawed in its own way - the portrait of wildly eccentric 1970s academia has been done before, and better, by David Lodge, while Effie's detective novel seems to have no purpose other than to alert the reader to the presence of a murder elsewhere in the novel. Atkinson writes well, and Emotionally Weird is still an amusing read, but those expecting a novel of the standard of Behind the Scenes at the Museum will be disappointed.
Louise East is an Irish Times journalist