Margaret Forster is a brilliant and prolific writer..She is an unassuming prose stylist. Her sentences are crafted with an artisanal eye – brief descriptions that never intrude; quietly powerful turns of phrase. Her plots take place in ordinary houses, on ordinary streets, within ordinary families..The book it most reminded me of, curiously enough, was Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending. There is the same sense of a psychological detective story, of piecing together the fragments of an unresolved past. The passages where Julia deals with her young clients – alternately rebellious, sullen or confused – are particularly intriguing. As an adult, Julia possesses great insight into their behaviour and yet seems to have cultivated a wilful blindness to her own past transgressions.

Just like Barnes's protagonist, Julia has retold her own story in order to create a self she can live with. But unlike The Sense of an Ending, The Unknown Bridesmaid has a sustained momentum and a more satisfying resolution, while leaving enough unanswered questions to keep the mind ticking over long after the final page has been turned.

Barnes, of course, won the Booker for his novel. I hope that Margaret Forster gets the recognition she deserves for this one.