Through the 1990s, tales of childhood abuse were thick on the ground, the villain generally a brutal father. In this charged debut novel, it is the mother – volatile, cigarillo-smoking, and imperious, who inflicts profound damage on her daughters, the final blow being her disappearance.

The older of the two children, called Missy (“because I’m sensible”), tells the story, and her gaze is unflinching as she tries to make sense of what happened and who is to blame. She turns the pieces of the puzzle: her mother, father, Auntie Margaret, England, Canada. She weighs clues, remembered phrases: “Your mother’s a crazy broad,” and “Your mother wanted to kill me once.”

Though grieving and burdened, Missy is less damaged than the younger Ruby, whose obsessive focus on her lost mother never wavers. The girls’ father tries to start a new life for his children in Nova Scotia and remarries as Missy and Ruby approach adolescence. His choice in women is again unfortunate: the girls despise his new wife. While the sense of inexorably building disaster does not lessen with the move to North American suburbia, it changes in tone, acquiring a Nabokovian edge, tinged with desperate absurdity.

On one level this is a psychological mystery: where has Mummy gone? As Ruby dwindles, there is some suspense as to whether she can be saved: will Mummy reappear, and in time? Is that what it will take to save Ruby? But this is primarily a literary novel, and a skilled one – Finlay-Young pays tribute to the late Matt Cohen for his mentoring. The author’s control over her imagery – wind-torn precipices and Humpty-Dumpty eggs, for example – is impressive and her characterization uncannily convincing. While it often makes grim and discomforting reading, Finlay-Young has important things to say about the conundrum of family and the mysterious chambers of the human heart.