After the Seventies saw the Booker taking its tentative first steps, stumbling here and there, occasionally landing on a genuine classic but more often than not serving up curiosities rather than solid-gold genius, we venture into more solid ground in the Eighties.

There’s a sense here of more self-awareness, of the need for winners to feel “important” and make a statement of some kind. There are certainly more hits than misses, and even the latter are perhaps in some ways more interesting than those of the previous decade.

Kerewin Holmes, sometime painter and amateur musician, is getting on with her somewhat solitary life in her self-built Tower home on the coast of New Zealand’s South Island, when she is visited by a troubled yet precocious mute child going by the name of Simon. Simon, the victim of the shipwreck of a European vessel in which his parents were presumed killed, is in the care of Joe, a local man of mostly Maori heritage, who strikes up an unlikely friendship with Kerewin based (largely) on his willingness to keep her company playing chess, cooking various largely fish-based meals and drinking alarming quantities of alcohol.