You hiding from me, Pa?

‘You have your own place now; your own magic.’
‘How to make it last, that’s the question.’
‘You mean, what spell should you invent – what’s in your power?’
Bea smiled. ‘Words, I suppose. Stories.’

Janine Burke in Lullaby, is writing about writing-out. Her character, Bea, is a writer with a block, seemingly precipitated by the failure of a marriage and the temporary loss of a recent lover, but the author is trying for much more than just this one story, which looks, on the evi­dence of the first chapter, to have more than enough fuel in it for a novel.