THE titular family of Alice Chambers' debut novel are grieving the loss of Hannah, eldest daughter of Rose and Henry Gold. Urban, middle class and cosmopolitan, they're the kind of family who if they were in a Wes Anderson movie would be quirky and vulnerable, yet strangely successful despite it all. However, this is Dublin and instead we have an idiosyncratic and emotionally stunted cast of characters, all colluding in the unconscious refusal to face up to a four-year-old tragedy.

The less-than-verbose Henry Gold is the head of the family.

Working in the Natural History Museum as "custodian of dead things", Henry is almost pathologically controlled and precise, yet he retains our sympathy. His wife Rose continues her decades-long tradition of writing a poem a day, while struggling to move on from Hannah's death. Their son, the ineffectual Omega, is deeply unhappy and has just been ditched by his wife, the beautiful yet hapless Cristelle. Youngest daughter Dawn is infuriatingly impulsive and is the kind of beany hat-wearing, in-and-out-of-love whiner you wish the author would hurl over the nearest fictional cliff to put us all out of our misery.

All of these characters inhabit a zestful narrative which stays on the right side of frothy. Chambers follows each of them on their journeys away from grief and towards acceptance, with a keen eye for detail and with exact and pleasurable language, without falling into the first-time author's trap of being too showy. This is complemented by her deft characterisation and a spare lyricism.

Cristelle's visit to the ballet is an example of this cool, measured approach: "The stage looked like a Degas painting come to life. The ballet dancers floated across the open space in a series of coded patterns that kept exploding and expanding, like lotus flowers on a blue pond."

Grief is the core of this novel.

Unspoken and unacknowledged, it drives each character along their separate journeys because, as Rose points out, "There is no getting over death. Only, perhaps, a moving beyond or past it . . . to another place entirely." Rose appears outwardly strong but she is haunted by strangely beautiful and disturbingly sensual dreams, which are rich with obvious symbolism. But like the rest of the characters in this book there is a sense that at her core she is emotionally incomplete, waiting for answers that may never come.

In keeping with her method, Chambers stops short of the kind of cathartic effect one would normally expect when dealing with such subject matter. Instead we are left with a climax that stops just short of complete closure, perhaps in an attempt to be true to the reality of grief. Chambers avoids any of the heavy handedness which could mar the subject matter and, instead of resorting to easy histrionics, she opts for nudging each of her characters along a gentle undertow of loss. It can be difficult to sustain such a method over the course of a novel, as it can come off as shallow and superficial, but there is a sense of intelligence behind the narrative which gives it that little bit of steel that helps prevent it falling back into a maudlin cutesy mode so beloved of more insecure writers.

Chambers has enough confidence and self-assuredness to create something with a little more substance than its initial quirkiness first suggests. This is a refreshing debut that shows promise for the future.