Little, Brown £14.99 pp370

At the heart of Sally Beauman’s absorbing novel is 13-year-old Maisie, who lives with her family (her father is dead) in a gloomy old abbey. Maisie, acutely sensitive to moods and feelings, watches the others; an irritated adult calls her a spy. She calmly agrees, but adds that if she were not, she would be lost in “Maisie’s maze”, wandering “in the dark eternally”.

Like her fictional namesake, the heroine of Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, Maisie is presented as precociously knowing and helpless. She is puzzled by Finn and Julia, her beautiful, confident older sisters, and perhaps envious. Beauman brilliantly conveys Maisie’s unexpected flashes of ruthlessness. In one darkly comic episode, she blackmails a relative who molests her into giving her £2,000.

From the start we are told that something terrible awaits Maisie. She narrates the early chapters with an innocence and knowingness that is touching, funny and disturbing. She has an affinity with the youthful Dan, also “forever on the outside, looking in”. But only Dan recognises her vulnerability. When an artist, Lucas, does a portrait of the sisters, Dan is troubled by his portrayal of a “deformed and desperate” Maisie.

The final chapters, set years later in 1991, mix regret with farce. Dan, now successful in advertising, is doing his best to drink himself into failure; in a bleakly comic scene he clashes with Julia, who has become a wealthy lifestyle guru. Movingly, it is Dan, at an exhibition of Lucas’s work, who sees, for the first time, the “small lost child” who “seems to be trying to escape from the frame in which Lucas has imprisoned her”. And it is the glossy, apparently superficial Julia who gives the last, sad account of the sister she once knew — yet never knew.

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