Nightjar Author: Emily Ruskovich ISBN-13: 9781784745592Publisher: Chatto and Windus Guideline Price: £18.99; 254ppThe author’s dazzling debut, Idaho, won the Dublin Literary Award in 2019, and Nightjar is another daring, immersive achievement by Emily Ruskovich. It’s distinguished by beautifully crafted, lyrical prose with enough vibrant realism to burn character and story deep into your mind, but unhinged enough to disquiet and invite reflection. In Victor’s Room, the first of five long stories, Rebecca falls for a man who grooms her, not for sexual conquest, but for an entire, meticulously fabricated existence. Over time, Grant succeeds in locking her into his own life’s grand delusion. “It was like somebody was whispering a warning in her ear all the time only she couldn’t hear it in his presence for all the noise of him.” Eerie and baffling, it is years before Rebecca deciphers the lies that have slowly eroded her. In Round Lake, Jade comes to question how we may love another when our past prevents us from knowing who we are ourselves. Although some memories of an event in Jade’s childhood are almost tactile: “... the smell of sunscreen, lake weed, mustard on the sandwiches ... Sunglasses on a mound of turquoise silk ...” others are a blur of emotions and fragments without context or proof. The truth changes everything Jade thinks she knows about her present and reveals her own misguided capacity to love as similarly blurred. The sense of place (Pacific Northwest) is fundamental here. An eerie country quiet resonates throughout. The characters bask in the beauty of their world – wild and gorgeous, full of flowers, meadows, lakes and clear, crisp mornings. But they know nature as both companion and taskmaster, and how freedom-drenched isolation can challenge sanity.The final, eponymous story intensifies in this last regard. Nightjar is borderline psychotic in its trippy mystery. One morning, Tess, a lonely child, unwittingly fishes a reptilian sliver of “image” from the surface of a water bucket, and slaps it on a rock. It’s a perfect reflection of a moment in time, and reappears in the bucket with a new rendering each dawn. Obsessed with this as a method of capturing time and place, Tess “becomes the girl with a moment for a face”. If Idaho presented as a literary psychological thriller and culminated as a complex, multi-voiced exploration of identity, then here the author grapples with truth, memory, love, loneliness, grief and the fragility of long-held beliefs. Helena Mulkerns is a journalist and a publisher