If you've ever had one of those cringe-making experiences, either at your own kitchen table or someone else's, when two parents have been arguing, then you will understand this book. It chronicles the break-up of a marriage over an affair, mostly through the eyes of Ruth, the eldest of four children.

Uncomfortable for her and others around her, the novel nonetheless paints a convincing picture of the dark side of a relationship gone horribly wrong as the two people in it react to the crisis.

Feaver's debut novel is described as, "often deeply funny", by Carol Anne Duffy. I have to say I found it depressingly unsparing.

As her shrill mother spends more time away, Ruth is forced into the position of "the bossy one" and in turns harangues and then pursues her distant father, who has another woman on the side.

They are in a 'holiday home' away from their London home.

With no TV and an uncomfortable home environment they gravitate, encouraged by their mother, to the local farm, where another family are going through a whole other set of miseries.

Robert Burdon, the wayward teenage son of the farmer, is spied by Ruth with his shirt off working in the fields and becomes the object of her desires.

Bearing in mind the general tone, we do not hold out much hope that her crush will develop in a gentle holiday romance. It isn't that kind of book.

Irritating younger sister Amelia is there to make life awkward for Ruth and Robert is too caught up in his own family drama to be able to focus properly.

Robert's younger brother died in a farming accident two years previously and his mother Alison, understandably, has not recovered from it.

The scene in which the two mother's meet . . . one polite and trying to hide her chain smoking over her grief, the other desperately raw and bearing her soul to anyone who will listen . . . is almost too much to bear.

Well written and at times wry, According to Ruth should only be read when you are feeling particularly strong and optimistic.