Meticulously weaving together literary themes of revenge and madness (it is easy to lose count how many woman submerge themselves in bodies of water at various points in the novel), this latest offering is a tapestry of fairytales old and new; so unsettling and oppressive that it blurs the distinctions between sanity and madness, reality and fantasy, leaving the reader guessing until the bitter end.

It would be easy to accuse Child 44 author Tom Rob Smith, whose latest novel is set between London and rural Sweden, of jumping on the bandwagon. The Farm lays out a pattern with which readers have become familiar. The picturesque but boring village ringed by isolated farms; a district dominated by a strong but taciturn patriarch; the disappearance of a vulnerable young woman, which is uncovered by an unreliable female investigator; the veneer of respectability that readers soon begin to suspect masks something rotten in the state of Scandi. But Smith, whose mother is Swedish, is playing a long game. The world he has created may initially appear full of enjoyably restful conventions, but any cliches in The Farm exist to wrongfoot us. This is a neatly plotted book full of stories within stories, which gradually unravel to confound our expectations.