Genre: Opinion/Argumentation

Too close by half How would you like an unreliable narrator earwigging through the party wall? Pity poor Neil. Pity even more his feisty, gorgeous young wife, Lucy. One day you're in clover; the next Annie has moved in next door and all hell's broken out. Annie brings a vast collection of grudges, superhuman mendacity and a trove of well-thumbed self-help manuals. These furnish her with what she sees as impeccable social "skills", diligently misapplied to every unsuspecting community she colonises. This novel flashes with hilarity - but it's also a take on noir: Annie's past turns out to be dodgy and violent. Neil's and Lucy's lives (should they manage to keep them) will never be the same. The narrating character of this compulsively readable debut is a scheming prowler, a creature of little brain and much self-righteous malice. It's her voice that gets into you. A nattering, normative voice. Alice performs her life as if it were decent and wholesome. At first the reader, like the new neighbours, is charitably inclined to believe poor Annie as she chats us through her house-move. "Some people are naturally honest and can't stretch the facts to save their life. I realised, too late, that I am one of them." Don't say you haven't been warned: Annie is a compulsive liar who will deceive both neighbour and reader as blithely and wantonly as she deludes herself. She lives nested in clich, protesting a decorous ordinariness on every preposterous page. But watch out for dresses disappearing from your clothes line, for your mail filched and the envelopes stuffed in the hedge. Annie will always happen to "find herself" cleaning ornaments at the window that overlooks a private world. In the blink of an eye Annie discerns that she and Neil are made for each other. That just leaves the lovely Lucy to get rid of. Neil, a sweet guy who readily feels sorry for folk, is soon (in Annie's eyes) her intimate. Annie's abstruse reading of her unwitting soul-mate detects Neil's hidden desire that his relationship with Lucy "end as amicably as possible. I could play a part in that, if he wanted me to". As the narrative develops, comedy moves into deeper areas of bloody violence and touches the springs of psychological anguish as we learn of Annie's horrendous childhood. Its tone however remains with noirish cartoon, burlesque. This is disturbing. The "fat woman" stereotype grates. Evoking the pathos of an early loss, it unsettles the humour without deepening the story's empathy. Annie's long history of sexual abuse, her self-marketing to the "fat porn" industry, possible infanticide and low self-estimate are equally disturbing. Yet who wouldn't kill for a comic gift like Jenn Ashworth's? Laugh-out-loud humour is outrageous and prodigal, especially in the ensemble dinner-party scene and the suspenseful final chapters. Prurient Annie, running amok in a full frenzy of righteous iconoclasm, finds "something nasty and sexual" in her prey's perfume drawer: "a lifelike replica of what it was intended to represent". I'm already looking forward to Ashworth's next novel. Most popular on the Guardian Today in pictures After advising tourists against travel to the cities of Jammu and Srinagar for nearly 20 years, the Foreign Office has lifted its guidelines after a fall in violence. So, Dal Lake and part of the Valley of Kashmir, one of India's most beautiful regions, are once again open to visitors