In her Orange-longlisted Their Finest Hour and a Half, Evans charted the capricious fortunes of a company making a dodgy propaganda film about Dunkirk. Crooked Heart is a dark comedy, moving between drollery, pathos, farce and harrowing moments of tragic insight; it’s also a grey comedy, situated among backstreet have-nots subsisting hand-to-mouth in a St Albans of stint and grudge....The prologue is a miniature masterpiece of serio-comic writing whose quality renders the more banal main story curiously anticlimactic...But the comedy of Crooked Heart is interestingly diverse and unstable.

An odd couple tale, Crooked Heart charts the relationship between a young orphan evacuee, Noel, sent to St Albans during the Second World War to live with Vera Sedge, who’s already struggling to make ends meet caring for her indolent son and mute mother...Evans has a delightful tone, airy and bouncy as a good Victoria sponge but with a perceptive irony and a spattering of caustic details stirred through. It recalls carefully constructed, deceptively light comic novels by the likes of Stella Gibbons and Nancy Mitford.

Crooked Heart is steeped in its historical moment, and Evans’s use of the idiom of the era is particularly convincing....But Evans never lets the period detail overwhelm her story – and, crucially, she doesn’t over-sentimentalise it either....And while the horror of war is tilted at, it’s also often a source of laughter in the dark: the casualty of an air raid is a comically flattened chicken, while serious injury is inflicted by a clumsy ambulance driver carelessly opening a door. It’s a refreshingly crisp approach, that allows moments of genuine pathos to be all the more resonant.