“Meaning,” said Virginia Woolf, “lies on the far side of language. It is meaning which in moments of astonishing excitement and stress we perceive in our minds without words.”

Eleven-year-old Isabelle Carter hasn't said a word in nine months. When we first meet her she is sitting at the table in the family room of her parents' weekend country house, drawing in her sketchbook, her knuckles white on the grip. Her father is outside in the cold, his hands deep in the complicated wiring of his truck. In the kitchen, Isabelle's mother Ruth is chopping vegetables and talking loudly to fill the space left by her daughter's elective silence.

Winter is coming, the sky threatens snow, and the cracks are beginning to show. Rejected by her fourth psychiatrist and threatened with expulsion from her Manhattan private school, Isabelle must find a way to speak before the year is out.

Winthrop is brilliant at depicting the bewildering world and its assault on the senses of a struggling adolescent. In her quiet, tightly controlled space, Isabelle receives the world in all its startling variety - the colour of light filtered through an eyelid, the hairy back of an exterminator or the clucking sound of an indicator - and fixates on these things while her parents bicker around her.

Like the silent characters that haunt Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse and The Waves, Isabelle creates a space of interrogation. Gradually, the absence (Isabelle's voice) becomes a presence (silence) and it drives the narrative forward, pulling us in to this tight little triangle, forcing us to feel the frustration and the fear even as the snow falls on quiet, delicately wrought scenes of superficial domestic harmony.

This extraordinary novel seduces as it also challenges: curiously provoking and offering up small flashes of illumination, like matches struck in that dim and meaningful space on the far side of language.

December by Elizabeth H. Winthrop
Sceptre, £16.99; 256pp Buy the book here

Times Recommends

• Sarah Palin and the Palindromes: 7 extraordinary connections
• Physics for Future Presidents: The Podcasts
• 10 Books Not To Read Before You Die