The Guardian

Raraou is 60, a washed-up actress scraping a living in Athens, her cheery demeanour belying an existence that struggles with loneliness and memories of a tragic life that at times threatens to overwhelms her. For Raraou was a spirited young girl when her home town of Greece was occupied by the Germans during the war.

Melancholy, said Wordsworth, is a "luxurious gloom of choice". Unlike depression, we choose to be melancholy, paradoxically deriving pleasure from feeling faintly sad. "Melancholy slows things, allows for percolation, facilitates solitude and solace for imagination," says Jacky Bowring in this dispassionate defence of the malady, madness, affectation - melancholy has been called many things over the centuries, but somehow eludes definition.

It is not strictly grief or sorrow or mourning, explains Bowring, but a complex constellation of moods.

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.

Sometimes it feels as though there is no bottom to Shaw's 720-page graphic novel examining the effects of divorce on a family. After 40-something years of marriage, David and Maggie Loony have decided they simply don't love each other any longer. The core of the family is splitting, and even a few days at their menacing beach house can't set things right. The decision sends the three adult children into a period of examination.

Eric is a debt counsellor (as Gaffney himself once was) whose days at the Cleator Moor Money Advice Shop in west Cumbria are spent helping anxious debtors avoid making payments. Mired in more debt than most of the clients he counsels, Eric maintains a façade of easy solvency for his girlfriend, Charlotte, while sneaking off to Manchester to feel alive again, to borrow some more cash from various shady characters, and to have peculiar sexual encounters with his first love, Julie.

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