Byline: HEPHZIBAH ANDERSON

ROSA LANE is a respected arts journalist on a national newspaper. Outwardly, she embodies a certain kind of success. Her full and focused London life is shared with boyfriend Liam, a wanly beautiful lobbyist, and orbited by a clique of bright friends. Inwardly, the 35-year-old heroine of Joanna Kavenna's Inglorious (Faber pounds 11.99, pp272) is a bundle of doubt and despair.

One afternoon, a few months after her mother's sudden death, Rosa sits at her desk envisaging a future 'draped in grey'. Desperate to shake this sense of 'inner blah', she bashes out a resignation email to her editor and embarks on a quest for the meaning of life. Her own, at any rate. Wry and coolly lyrical, Inglorious is the deftly entitled story of what happens next.

Mired in her mid-30s, Rosa seems a little too young, or perhaps too old, for this kind of existential crisis. Her peers are busy distracting themselves with property and parenthood and Rosa turns out to have proposed to Liam just a few months before the novel's start. He said no, though their relationship is limping on. Her resignation changes all that and Liam promptly gets engaged to another. Without him, Rosa's fall from grace accelerates.

Her friends are curious to hear what her 'plan' is. Alas, she has none and, as their patience wears thin and her cash runs low, her 'freak-out' looks increasingly like a full-on nervous breakdown. She scribbles reams of unsent letters, spends hours...