The Hours Before Dawn

Night after night, for no apparent reason, the baby cried. Night after night, Louise Henderson dragged herself out of bed, at two, at quarter past three, and again at five.

And during.the day she had to fend off not only Mrs. Philips, who threatened to call the police every time the baby cried, but Mrs. Hooper, that ultimate in permissive mothers. Not to mention her own two charming but difficult young daughters, Harriet and Margery. (If only Harriet and Socrates could have met, thought Louise wistfully, it would have done them both a world of good, particularly Socrates.)

Louise could have slept standing up, and she was grateful that the new tenant did nothing to add to the confusion. On the contrary, Vera Brandon was so quiet that Louise began finally to wonder about her. Why did the woman sit silently in her room all day long? Why did Mark, Louise's husband, seem to remember Miss Brandon from some other place? Why did Louise herself suddenly have a feeling of being watched by hostile eyes? Or was it true, as the neighbors were saying too sympathetically, that poor Louise's nerves were going to pieces, that she was beginning to confuse fact with fantasy? Then she learned about Miss Brandon's strange and frightening diary. . . .

Mixing the comic realism of life in a young household with chilling suspense, the author achieves the well-nigh impossible by making the reader laugh in one paragraph and shiver in the next. Celia Fremlin is off to a great start with this completely absorbing first novel.