Trezza Azzopardi's highly accomplished first novel - now on the Booker shortlist - describes a family torn apart by ignorance, poverty and addiction. It is narrated from the point of view of Dolores, the youngest of six daughters. Frankie arrives in Cardiff from Malta in 1948, with only a cardboard suitcase and a ruby ring. He prospers, becoming the co-owner of the Moonlight Cafe. He marries Mary, a gentle, ineffective Welshwoman, and the babies start to arrive.
Frankie is a compulsive gambler, and he loses his share in the cafe to a gangster, Joe Medora. In vivid, stylish prose, Azzopardi brings to life the Maltese community of Cardiff in the early 1960s. One daughter, aged nine, is "given" to Medora in exchange for a house; another is married off to a rich older man. Fran becomes an arsonist and ends up in a children's home - which is nothing beside the fate of Dol, who loses her hand in a fire when only a few weeks old, and is regarded by her superstitious father as cursed. The full scale of her humiliation is only revealed 40 years later, when the sisters, who were taken into care when Frankie ran off, meet up at their mother's funeral. That the children were victims of human weakness, rather than premeditated evil, somehow makes it even more terrible.
Alannah Hopkin is an author and critic