The End of the Day by Bill Clegg, review: a quietly devastating mystery novel

The literary agent Bill Clegg’s own bookish output has, thus far, had trauma at its centre: he’s written two memoirs about being addicted to crack cocaine and his debut novel, Did You Ever Have a Family, spirals out from a catastrophic fire. His second novel, The End of the Day, a finely wrought domestic mystery, is marginally lighter, but still quietly devastating.

A bulky briefcase, a careless rich family and a 49-year-old secret link the novel’s five main characters. Three of these are women approaching 60, who reflect on their (wildly different) childhoods in a small town in Connecticut. Dana Goss is the domineering, loaded and now increasingly forgetful heiress of a Civil War-era estate. She and Jackie, her working-class neighbour, were best friends until they were 19, when some carefully hinted at event broke them up. Lupita, now a taxi driver, is the daughter of a Mexican family employed by the Gosses. Hap wrestles with the death of his estranged father while neglecting his newborn; and his mother Alice remembers how he came into her life.

The novel asks what binds people together, but mostly interrogates what tears them apart. Friendship is a “made mist that looked like matter”; Hap’s family “an elaborately painted mural”. Class is a dominant force: the Gosses’ existence is one in which “the rules and interpersonal dynamics were pre-determined”. Lupita’s father, their chauffeur, struggles in “a world where he was, if not invisible, translucent enough that people looked through him”.

Clegg’s unspooling of the central mystery is masterful – its contours hinted at but its nucleus unexpected. In The End of the Day, the truth is only ever destructive: “Life appeared no more than a long, bleak unravelling, a stripping away of layers, like the skins of an onion, one by one, peeled back to expose what? The truth? Did it always end in nothing?”

The End of the Day is published by Jonathan Cape at ￡14.99. To order your copy for ￡12.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop