O’Hagan’s style is scrupulous. The book reads as spare, despite his astonishing ability to create a cast of rounded, credible voices, from earnest care-home workers to rough young squaddies..The novel’s structure is also a testament to his skill. The Illuminations could easily feel loose, given its subject and its changes in perspective and setting, but O’Hagan keeps the story clearly visible by building it in short sections... The light might be artificial and incomplete, but it shows us the pieces of what we have, and what we can make from them. Like Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse beam sweeping across the dark bay, O’Hagan’s illuminations are searing.

O’Hagan’s ability to sum up a life in the most poignant, matter-of-fact way is reminiscent of Kipling, too. Of Anne he writes: “She left herself behind in a room, and that way survived her own potential, until her mind began to fray.” That idea of surviving one’s own potential is one of the book’s gloomier burdens.

It’s a measure of O’Hagan’s compassion that after balancing these stories of war and family – braving the battlefield and braving the passing of time – the ultimate note is hopeful and almost gentle, of something that seems real and vital.

The Illuminations is a book at once both tender and ambitious. In the writing of it, O’Hagan has cast a shimmering light on love and memory, life and loss and on the secrets we keep from those closest to us, sometimes even from ourselves.