A PARTISAN'S DAUGHTER

Louis de Bernieres (Harvill Secker, £16.99)

Reading this book, I was reminded of an old friend, with whom I have now lost contact, who pointed at a patch of London sky and explained that that was where she used to live. The area in which we stood had been redeveloped, and the old Victorian building that had once housed her attic flat had vanished, leaving not a trace behind.

Unlike the books that made the author famous - notably Captain Corelli's Mandolin but also earlier fantastical works such as The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, which was written after a spell teaching English in Colombia and was set in Latin America - this book, A Partisan's Daughter (Harvill Secker, £16.99) explores a single, nebulous notion rather than developing a compelling saga.

That single notion is a poignant examination of memory, reality, make-believe and love, set in the 1970s. Our hero (or perhaps anti-hero), 40-something and trapped in a loveless marriage, falls in love with a Yugoslav girl full of stories about her partisan father.

Are those stories true and who is that girl, anyway? Such questions are unanswered. Not only do we gather that the building in which she lived disappeared (like my friend's) but that everyone living in it was really someone else. They had all simply taken over the rent-books of people who had lived there before - and then, for various and nefarious reasons of their own, continued to use those people's names.

A thought-provoking - though slight - book, this neverthe less holds out hope for the future. Shining through the memories (false or otherewise) of the Yugoslav girl are signs of de Bernieres's deep understanding of Yugoslavia and its recent, tragic history. Could, for instance, there possibly be a book on the way which will allow readers to discover what it was really like to live through the civil war there - in much the same way as we learned in Captain Correlli what it was really like to live through Nazi occupation of a Greek island?

Louis de Bernieres will be at the Oxford Literary Festival on April 5.