Most of us show different versions of ourselves to lovers, colleagues, friends. Emma, in Hart’s Costa-shortlisted debut novel, is more fragmented than most. She is a Brit living in America, thanks to her US soldier husband, whom she met in a military compound in Iraq.

“Adam knows Baghdad Emma too … he keeps that part of me alive,” she explains. Her job, helping Iraqis secure US visas, was intense and fulfilling; but now, she is redundant and fearful in another strange land, as Adam is redeployed and she is left waiting, just another “military wife”. Having travelled around the world to try to get to know it better, she finds herself feeling like “an alien” everywhere.

Emma collects fragments of stone and glass from the places she visits, and in Colorado she sets out to make them into a mosaic – to build something beautiful from all the different pieces of her life.

Though the plot drags in places, Hart writes piercingly about loss – of a loved one and of oneself - as Emma tries to figure out where home is, and who she is. A memorable, cohesive story of a fractured life.

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