A story which deals with a best friend's death followed swiftly by sleeping with a long-lost father must - almost by definition - be described as compelling. Doll is the sort of tale you don't want to read - it veers between pain, loss, and the incendiary passion of Thea, a woman who seeks out her father and instead finds a lover. She lies to herself and to him to embark on an affair that was 'quite like love'. But like Thea's awareness of her self-induced destruction - once started on this ride, you can't stop.

Thea is as compelling as her story, an open, frank and very real character who keeps attention throughout. She describes conversation with her mother as 'like being worried to death by terriers', and Sheffield (a UK northern city) as 'an ugly girl with a trendy haircut, somehow less likeable for having made the effort'. Sharp-tongued and astute, Thea seems an unlikely victim of fate, her subsequent actions explained as the response to her best friend's suicide, disappointment, and lack of purpose in life. Equally unlikely are her chance meeting with her half-brother as he tries to chat her up in a bar, and the sudden explosion of lust she incites in her middle-class-middle-of-the-road father, who - not realising who she is - pins her to the floor on their second encounter.

Tortuous plot twists aside, the writing shifts movingly between emotions. It laces through Thea's talks with her dead best friend, uncompromising accounts of sex and dry vaginas, unwanted and unpermitted love, and the rejection still felt by a woman twenty-five years after her father left her. The cities of Newcastle and Sheffield are intricately depicted with a familiar eye. While she never slips into sentimentality, the writer often achieves the impossible in giving Thea's behaviour sense, logic and empathy as she seeks desperately for comfort in a world that has taken everything.

'I was 26', says Thea, 'and it had taken me this long to realise that I could just go to bed with a man and not have sex, not be drunk, but could just revel in the feel of his arms around me, the comfort of the embrace better than sex because it made me feel more wanted, more special than sex ever had, more lovely and more loved. Why did I have to have found it here?'

But despite this, there are moments when the book protests too much, particularly as Thea berates herself over and again for being a terrible person. As though the writer knows she has created a scenario to rival (American & British TV programmes) Oprah or Eastenders, there are constant put-downs and comparisons to these shows. This adds a forced and slightly histrionic flavour to an otherwise delicate work. The confrontational beginning and blunt conclusion 'Look at the pervert. Look at the whore. You think I give a fuck?' threatens to override and cheapen the pain and humour in between. Nonetheless, Doll is recommended reading to anyone who can take the darkest sides of want.

(c) Philippa Tatham 2009

reviewed 17 March 2009 / London

NOTES - Doll by Tracey Sinclair; first published in 2005 by Kennedy & Boyd, an imprint of Zeticula, Glasgow, Scotland. Available from eg Amazon. First edition: ISBN 1-904999-21-2; Paperback; 178 pages.

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